The Ghastly Ones

Well well, at last a view of this underrated flick. But you can't find a good copy of it, terrible copy full with green drops, the editing isn't syncronized, the sound do has sometimes that terrible hiss and sometimes you even can hear the camera recording. Overall it's too dark, a waist of time you should say but it isn't. It's a bit slow, the first half part of the movie it's all talking and making love to each other. It is even still weird that the girls in movies from the 60's never wear any bra's. When they enter the sleeping room it's full glory. Anyway, banned in the UK since 84 and still on the video nasties list. The reason is simple, it's gory for their time being. It really has some nasty dismemberement's and it's creepy in some way due the fact that it is filmed handycam way. So every shot the image is moving, things they do these days with the steadycam. The Ghastly Ones could have been better if the quality of the film was better but still better then other films of the time like Schoolgirls In Chains.

A couple frolic in the countryside just outside an abandoned house. They are stalked by a monstrous-looking man. The man attacks the couple, ripping out the man's eyeball. As he rolls around on the deck with the man, finishing him off, we hear director Andy Milligan shout "cutting away, move". And so begins "The Ghastly Ones", a dismal splatter-attempt from infamous director Andy Milligan. Shot on a budget of around $2,000, the film is widely loathed and was even described by Stephen King as being "morons with cameras". Old Stephen wasn't far off there. The camera work is absolutely shocking. It shakes up and down and looks for all the world like found-footage. Milligan was extremely inept when it came to making films. He hadn't a shred of talent. There are a few gory scenes that got this the credit of being a Video Nasty, but the aforementioned camera work is so bad it's a wonder that the censors could even make out what was happening. The story sees three sisters and their husbands invited to hear their late-father's will. In it, he instructs that they are to live in "sexual harmony" - seriously? - on the island where the house is situated for a couple of days before it is revealed what they inherit blah blah blah. While there they become the next victims of some crazed lunatic going around chopping people up. Milligan, for reasons I can't understand, remade this film in 1978 and titled it "Legacy of Horror" or "Legacy of Blood" as it's also known as. I actually seen that one before the original, which is why the rather generous rating of three stars. He somehow managed to make a nearly scene-by-scene remake worse than this amateurish, back-yard shoot. That was so bad that when I watched "The Ghastly Ones" I felt like I was watching a better film.

Three sisters travel to their late father's mansion where they are to spend three nights together with their respective husbands, before they are eligible to hear the will (read to them by a man wearing make-up to rival Ramses' from Blood Feast (1963)). Also there are the two housekeepers, Martha (Veronica Radburn) and Ruth (Maggie Rogers), and Martha's deformed and dim-witted son Colin (Hal Borske), who we see murder two people at the beginning of the film. After a night of pompous partying, one of the couples, Veronica (Eileen Hayes) and Bill (Don Williams), find a dead rabbit in their bed (which was previously seen being eaten alive by Colin) with a note attached reading 'blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit."

Directed by exploitation and horror hack Andy Milligan, The Ghastly Ones (titled Blood Rites in the UK and placed on the Video Nasty list) is a fine example as to why he is considered one of the worst directors of all time, commonly placed in the same category of Edward D. Wood, Jr. and Herschell Gordon Lewis. He began his career in small-time off- Broadway production during the 1950's, and his experience in that medium is evident here as, unlike most trashy horror films, the film is almost unbearably wordy, as the main characters have their mundane conversations between the brief moments of gore. Saying that, I would much rather be listening to conversation than watching overlong stalking scenes or disco dancing which was so prevalent as running-time-filler in Grindhouse movies.

However, the movie is a massive bore, and even with the slender running- time of 70 minutes, I checked how long there was remaining at least three or four times. The awful, clunky camera-work, added to the fact that the film stock was so poor I could barely make out faces, gave me a headache. When the moments of inevitable gore come, the film is given a little relief, as the scenes of pitch-fork impaling and disembowelment are so bad it does give the film a little charm. It would work quite nice as a double-bill with the aforementioned Blood Feast, as they are both short, amateurish, and most notably, s**t.

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THE GHASTLY ONES is a brainboiler of a cheap horror film. The plot involves three sisters and their husbands travelling to their isolated childhood home to hear the reading of their late father's will, but someone is willing to kill to keep the money all to themselves. Director/producer Andy Milligan attempts a 1905 setting for his film despite something like $20.00 for a budget, although its highly unlikely that women from that era wore see-through black negligees to bed. Along with the wobbly period details, there's stabbings,decapitation, mutilations with hacksaws, and live rabbit eating. Ole! Ten years later, Milligan remade this flick as the somewhat more competent(and narratively coherent)LEGACY OF HORROR. If you're looking for a laughable, confused mess, go with THE GHASTLY ONES. If you want a more understandable film that offers characters whose motives are revealed during the course of the story, go with LEGACY OF HORROR. Calm me old fashioned, but I prefer the latter, because the reasons revealed for some of the characters' behavior makes the resulting carnage all the more chilling. And the simpleton brother is show as an abused, sad waste of human potential, not a ghoulish geek. The scene where he sits in his dank basement room, battering a teddy bear while grunting the word "stupid" over and over is more chilling than a dozen disembowelings--something that I think Milligan was not conscious of. Okay, so maybe I overanalyze, but I like to see the psychological underside of these characters. After all, a psycho doesn't make himself crazy, does he?

Ghastly Ones, The (1968)

1/2 (out of 4)

Three couples spend the night in an old dark house so that they can collect an inheritance but a killer is running loose. This is my first Andy Milligan film and it's really no worse than countless other exploitation films that were out at the time. Everything about the film is bad, especially the sex scenes, which are probably the worst I've ever seen in a movie. The director does try to build suspense but this here comes off rather laughable but then again, everything here comes close to laughable.