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Monstrosity (1987)

Dir: Andy Milligan

Three thugs (all looking old enough to know better, and including "Bloodthirsty Butchers" actor Frank Echols) mug an old man, cut his throat (a cheap, but perfectly serviceable bit of FX that is still far beyond the gore work in earlier Milligan films), beat up a woman and steal her car, break into another young woman's house and proceed to beat and rape her.
She is taken to Hospital (which is really scruffy little room!) and while recovering is brought mug shot books by the Cops to see if she can identify her attackers.
But these bad guys are slightly smarter than we at first thought, and the leader disguises himself as a Doctor, breaks into the woman's Hospital room and guts her!

Vowing vengeance, her student boyfriend Mark and his student pals Carlos and Scot decide to build a 'Golem' (Milligan long-time regular Hal Borske) from human and animal parts (yes, you are reading this correctly!), bring it to life and have it track down the murderers so there is no risk to themselves!

But not everything goes to plan when an unexpected, and very unlikely, romance breaks out……

 

Sometimes wrongly described as Milligan's last film (he actually had 2 more to go, "The Weirdo" and "Surgikill"), "Monstrosity" saw Milligan filming in Hollywood and re-teaming with his Producer/Distributor and general financial and artistic nemesis Lew Mishkin, Son of his old Distributor William Mishkin.
It was to be a doomed project though as the movie failed to get a theatrical release, only appearing on VHS dupes and only recently given a new lease of life on DVD thanks to 'Video Kart'.

Camera noise is the first sound to greet us after the credits (something very familiar to Milligan groupies) as we go on a brief California hills travelogue before moving to the city streets.
And these glossy (at least glossy for anything Milligan used to do) shots of the city are a far cry from the early days of grainy guerrilla shot footage that gave his films such a great concrete jungle atmosphere in his New York years.
Also unusual is the guitar/keyboard heavy soundtrack that sounds like its came from some latter day Charles Bronson flick. (and talking of the score, listen out later for a deranged variant on the 'Loony Tunes' music!), and when all these things are put together you would be forgiven in thinking this isn't a Milligan film after all!
But Milligan makes the fact perfectly clear that "Monstrosity" is indeed one of his warped creations, because as the film progresses he tends to shoot much of it at a sharp, tilting angle for reasons known only to himself.

Another unusual aspect of the film is that, unlike his earlier movies (acidic humour, bitter camp and unintentional laughs aside), "Monstrosity" is basically scripted as an intentional, broad horror/comedy (the 80's would see comedic horror/gore movies come into their own, with movies like "Evil Dead 2", "Re-Animator", "Frankenhooker" being only the tip of the iceberg) which works in it's favour sometime but means it also becomes rather bland at times and lacks that acid edge and wonderfully pure camp that would come to define Milligan's work.
The film does throw in the gore and grizzly sights, but Milligan is obviously making a genuinely amusing parody here, almost as if he decided that by this time the only way to approach such material, on such a budget, is to create the laughs on purpose in a generally humorous project rather than by accident in a supposedly serious project.

The student's plans and their 'Golem' creation provide most of genuine smiles during the movie's first half, not least of which is the deliriously crazy, slam bang approach Milligan has in avoiding anything even remotely realistic where their experiments are concerned
The students, purely down to Mark being a Medical Student and Carlos having done some reading-up on legends, have no problem in creating their creature in their garage, "My friend Wally's a Veterinarian"! "I know a guy who works in the City Morgue", and only hit a, brief, hiccup when trying to re-animate it, "Scot, we've tried everything! We've used incantations from Black Magic, read from The Book of the Dead, prayed, Devil worshipped…nothing's working"!
In fact putting together a flat-pack wardrobe looks harder.
This part of the movie also provides some welcome gore and also some of the film's best dialogue (always a great Milligan strength but something as a whole "Monstrosity" is sadly lacking) when Scot describes the only head he was able to get:
Scot: "…some disgusting, mutilated pervert we had in Pathology last week. Hasn't got a brain in his head, so I took one from basic Dissection class…What have we got for his left arm and leg"?
Mark: "You know my friend Wally the Veterinarian? He loaned me the arm and leg…of a gorilla".
There is just too much craziness to quote here actually…but the origin of the Gorilla parts is also a comic gem!

And just to prove High comedy is the name of the game here and Milligan throws in an hysterical portrayal of a group of drugged out punks who walk along the street dancing, in truly embarrassing clothes, and have a woman member who is proud of the love shown to her by her man…because he carved his name into her arm with a knife and marked her as his property by carving the fact into her arse cheek!

We do have some moments that are just bad though, whether the film is a comedy or not, like when one of the killer's stands in a well lit room, only about a foot away from his dead friend, who's covered in blood, and declares "what the hell are you doing down there? If you want to sleep go to bed"!
This whole sequence is dubious actually, as Milligan spends ages on the bemused face of the actor while showing tilted close-ups of light bulbs, corners of tables and a pair of stepladders!

'Frankie' the Golem is a wonderfully silly creation and is the movies main focus point and source of comedy. Sporting numerous bloody stitches, a hairy gorilla arm and leg, a silly looking replacement eye that resembles a bloody fried egg and a ginger fright wig that looks like a cross between Harpo Marx and Art Garfunkel, 'Frankie' has to be seen to be believed and Borske is obviously having fun and does a wonderfully camp turn portraying the creature's child-like aspects and the that Frankie prefers teddy bears to murderous rampages!
Milligan throws in a really bizarre blood/semen idea concerning 'Frankie' as well, which provides some messy fun, where he has 'Frankie' leak blood from his cranium whenever he gets excited!
Though looking back at Milligan's eventual death from AIDS, this idea has now got a rather warped aspect to it.

Blood of course brings us to the gore, and although obviously cheap it's more often than not better quality than most Milligan films, if that means much!
The Hospital gutting is especially above and beyond the gore FX seen in Milligan's 60's/70's films (compare it to an evisceration scene in "The Ghastly Ones" to see the huge difference) and is suitably twisted and bloody. Though the less said about the floppy rubber tubing standing in for intestines, which is (vigorously) pulled out by the killer, the better.
There are still some typically bad FX here that would be at home on something like "Guru the Mad Monk" (like a very poor axe in the head effect), but in general the FX are a step up for Andy and provide plenty of bloody entertainment.
Just to up the exploitation content Milligan throws a couple bared breasts into the mix just for the hell of it, and we of course admire this decision.

The film does rather go off the boil during the last 3rd, (and gets even weirder, believe it or not, when a totally unexpected new character literally appears from nowhere) as 'Frankie' spends more and more time hanging around the garage and the students become power mad.
And when the comedy also becomes strained the movie starts to lose its hold on the viewer's attention.
Fortunately though Andy throws in a bit more cheesy gore to keep the horror aspect alive during this rather stodgy section of the film until unveiling the cheesy finale and it's outrageously out of place classical library music. Though the less said about the bizarre final few seconds the better.

Overall then "Monstrosity" is a mostly fun (and funny) gory romp, with an outrageously whacked-out creature, some crazy set-ups and enjoyably silly dialogue.
But it sags as it goes on and there is quite frankly something missing here that made most of his earlier movies so uniquely warped and Milligan's acidic attitude to the Human Race is sadly missed.
Well worth a watch though for fans of low budget Trash, cheesy gore and for Milligan fans to experience some of his last work.