Blood

This is one of Milligan's better Gothic style horror dramas. It's a lot in the style of THE RATS ARE COMING!THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE! But not as dull. The acting is much better than in most of his films and the camera work is not bad.

The film does have two strikes against it. 1)When the wolf man turns into a werewolf he is wearing a silly looking werewolf mask and 2)The action scenes seem to being missing something as if something was cut out. This is how most of Milligan's films seem to be edited though so I can't tell if I was watching a censored print or if it was edited that way.

Set in the 1880's the son of the wolf man moves back to America from Europe with his wife, who happens to be the daughter of Dracula - and three members of staff. They are employed to grow vampire plants in the basement in order to keep the wife Regina alive! Our first glimpse of her is as an old hideous looking hag but a dose from the plants and she is back to looking radiant, In fact there are three attractive women in this movie, one of the few redeeming points. There is a suggestion of incest between one of them and her brother, who pays a brief visit to the house before being killed by Regina, but no sex or nudity, despite the director being a producer of porn. Director Andy Milligan was known for making films on tiny budgets, doing much of the work behind the camera himself., I respect that even if the end result is poor. To be fair this is only the second of his films that I have seen, the other being the truly awful The Ghastly Ones, but as a fan of cult and bad movies I hope to watch more. There can be no denying that this is a very cheap, bad movie. Despite being set in the 1880's a kitchen used in some scenes is obviously from 1973. On the other hand the acting isn't too bad considering it has a cast of largely unknowns (Patti Gual is the only one who appears to have a decent filmography). The script is amusing, lines such as "We'll face tomorrow tomorrow" only adds to the charm. The "special" effects are terrible and for the transformation into werewolf the husband obviously just put a rubber mask on. Great ending, made me chuckle but I don't like spoilers in my reviews so you'll have to see it for yourself! I would only score this movie 2/10 on technical merit but I did find it mildly amusing, hence my 4/10.

Well, here's my first Andy Milligan film, and I'm feeling fairly indifferent about it, even though I fully knew what to expect. A strange family move into a new home. The husband is some sort of doctor working on various serums from carnivorous plants. His wife has an aversion to sunlight and needs constant injections. One of their servants is used as a blood bank to feed the plants and is all messed up due to this, and of the other two servants, one has no legs and the other is well on the way to having no legs due to some horrible disease.

The doctor meets his solicitor who's up to something dodgy with his dead father's estate, and also he falls in love with the solicitor's secretary. All this leads to, mainly, is people standing around in period costumes, talking endlessly. This film was under an hour long and I still had to watch it over two nights just to keep my attention.

There's werewolves, vampires, man-eating plants, people getting axed through the head, but everything to me seemed a bit flat and boring. Also, it looked like someone killed a mouse for real at one point – that's no good, is it? I'm not writing Milligan off yet – I've got Guru the Mad Monk to watch too – I'll give that a chance soon.

The son of a werewolf marries the daughter of Count Dracula in this rare Milligan gorefest.Hope Stansbury gives a great performance and is perfectly cast as Dracula's evil daughter.There's lots of gruesome gory scenes including a man who gets a meat cleaver struck into his skull.This is Milligan's most gothic looking movie that I've seen so far and it's worth a look not only for gorehounds but for horror fans in general.I give this movie ***** out of ***** for it's originality and style.

Blood (1974)

** (out of 4)

Downright craziness from director Andy Milligan has Lawrence Talbot working under the last name Orlovsky. He moves his wife, the daughter of Dracula, into a house where he also brings along a wide range of weird people. Inside the house he is growing plants, which will eat humans but there are more dark secrets within these walls.

Milligan has a huge cult following and it's really easy to see why. I've gone through a hand full of the director's films and for the most part I've found them ranking from downright horrid to suicide worthy. With that said, BLOOD is probably the best film I've seen from him because of how crazy and bizarre it is. I'm not sure if the director just figured he'd throw everything into a film and see what would stick but you've got a werewolf, Dracula's daughter, a deformed mutant and of course the man-eating plants.

There are some really kooky moments throughout this thing ranging to some bizarre dialogue where the wife wants to know if her husband still loves her to a werewolf attack that is filmed in such dark conditions that you can't even see what is happening. The melodrama that Mulligan adds to a lot of his horror pictures is something that actually works here because of the fact that it's a werewolf and a vampire. The added supporting of the other freaks is just a good bonus.

The performances really aren't all that bad and the film has a much more professional look that the majority of the director's work. At just under 70 minutes the movie manages to keep your interest throughout.