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By Adrian Smith

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BFI Flipside Dual Format Edition

(Note: this review pertains to the UK Region 2 release.)

New York underground filmmaker and avante-garde theatre director Andy Milligan is perhaps best known for his sleazy exploitation movies that ran in 42nd St theatres for years throughout the 1970s. Memorable titles include The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972) and The Ghastly Ones (1968), the latter banned in the UK during the 1980s as a “video nasty.” A meeting in 1968 in New York with Leslie Elliot, a British distributor, lead to several of his films being distributed in the UK. Even better for Milligan was the opportunity to shoot five new films under Elliot's production arm Cinemedia Films. Finding himself a flat in Soho and becoming acquainted with the British by hanging out with male prostitutes on Piccadilly Circus, Milligan developed a study of poverty,...

To celebrate their 13th anniversary this year, the Melbourne Underground Film Festival is going green!

No, they’re not out to save the kookaburra or anything. Instead, they’re hosting a special tribute to the New Irish Low Budget Cinema, featuring two films by acclaimed filmmaker Ivan Kavanagh, plus work by Colin Downey, Gary Kenneally and Gerard Lough.

Muff will host a repeat screening of Kavanagh’s celebrated thriller Tin Can Man — it previously screened at Muff in 2008 — as well as his latest film, The Fading Light. The three other Irish films screening all fall into the horror/thriller genres, from Downey’s The Looking Glass to Kenneally’s Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman and Lough’s trilogy-ending The Shaken 3. And, in addition, the entire fest kicks off with the opening night Irish thriller Charlie Casanova by Terry McMahon.

But don’t think Muff is all Irish all the time this year,...

While his dream of directing a "Wonder Woman" movie remains just that, it looks like Nicolas Winding Refn will get to exercise his female fantasy hero kicks through another outlet, taking on an equally iconic character.

Deadline reports Gaumont and producer Martha De Laurentiis are bringing the iconic hero "Barbarella" -- who first appeared in the Jean-Claude Forest graphic novel and was memorably played by Jane Fonda in Roger Vadim's big screen adaptation -- to the small screen with Refn to direct and executive produce. And well, that's about it at the moment. But it appears this will be pitched as a new series, so we can only guess that once the pilot is out of the way, Refn's involvement will be at the producer level only. That said, his input can only help make this a cut above, and hopefully succeed where NBC's sad "Wonder Woman" miserably failed.

Back in 2009, I interviewed Nicolas Winding Refn about his movie Bronson, and in the course of our conversation he mentioned a director whose name meant very little to me:

The filmmakers I would have loved to meet are more obscure, like Andy Milligan. He’s a very obscure filmmaker who made films for Times Square in the 60s and 70s.

After our conversation, I went to seek out more information about Milligan and discovered that, little-known as he was, there was a book on him by the biographer Jimmy McDonough called The Ghastly One. (This book was, in fact, what got Winding Refn interested in Milligan in the first place.) I found that Milligan’s movies, however, were far from easy to get hold of.

That is seemingly beginning to change, though. The BFI has just recently put out Milligan’s Nightbirds through its excellent Flipside label, and to mark...

Why the notorious Drive director paid £16,000 on eBay to buy up Milligan's films and bring them back to life

When I was about 12, I tricked my mother into buying me my first book about film: Splatter Movies, by John McCarty. That's when I became aware of Andy Milligan and started looking for videos of his films – such as Gutter Trash (1969), Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973), Guru, the Mad Monk (1970) and The Naked Witch (1967).

When I finally saw them I was taken aback – first by their crudeness, and then by how difficult it was to sit through them. But, at the same time, I realised that here was a man who made films his own way, on his own terms. He used the medium as something he could streamline his consciousness into, and I found that fascinating.

I had moved to New York, aged eight, in 1978, too late to experience anything of the real Times Square.

★★☆☆☆ Andy Milligan is a perplexing and difficult director to grasp, and nowhere is this more evident than in his 1970 feature Nightbirds, starring Berwick Kaler and Julie Shaw. Nightbirds undoubtedly possesses a compelling narrative centred around two young, down-and-out hippies who, through a chance encounter, come to live together in a run-down flat in the East End of London.

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Martha Marcy May Marlene

Although she took minor roles in movies starring her famous siblings, the twins Mary-Kate and Ashley, Elizabeth Olsen never really hitched along with them for a free ride to fame. Instead, she studied hard at perfecting her acting craft – a good thing, as we have no shortage of celebrities without portfolio.

It has paid off, and with this movie she arrives as a capable, subtle actor who is more than able at carrying a complex and demanding role. Olson plays Martha, a young woman who has fled life in a commune that, at first, seemed to be doing nothing more sinister than setting up a self-sufficient rural idyll in the Catskill Mountains. She's eagerly taken in by her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who has no idea what she's been up to for the past two years. However, her behaviour is full of strange markers that reveal a great deal of indoctrination.