cinema history class: bloodthirsty butchers

Session: Gory, Gory, Hallelujah! Week 1
Movie: Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970)
Directed by Andy Milligan

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Plot:
In this retelling of Sweeney Todd, the evil barber murders and dismembers his customers. He then provides the meat to a local pie shop. Horror ensues.

Reaction and Other Folderol:

It was very difficult to watch this movie -- for several reasons related to budgetary constraints. According to IMDB, this film had a budget of about $18,000. Based on what Keith told us about Andy Milligan (more on that later), he probably pocketed about $9,000 and spent the other $9,000 on the film.

The picture quality was very poor -- if I recall correctly, it was shot on 8mm film. There were places where the camera angles looked odd to me. People were positioned at 90-degree angles to each other and therefore speaking into each other's profiles. People were speaking while halfway offscreen. Keith told me that that was actually a respected avant-garde style. No matter. To my eyes it was sloppy, and it made it harder to watch. Further, the characters were, almost all, ugly. Hauntingly ugly. At times it felt as if I was watching some kind of inbred-centered story.

The sound quality was simply awful. There seemed to be a constant low-level rumble, which made it hard to make out the dialogue (of course, the heavy English accents didn't help). And that can be a big problem for a movie as dialogue-heavy as this. To add to the problem, Milligan stuck with public domain recordings for background music (using an original score would have cost money). As a result, for the most of the film, the ill-fitting music was in a weird death-battle with the movie itself.

Ethan hit the nail on the head when he compared this movie to early John Waters productions. There was a similar lack of quality. Of course, there was nothing here to match the grotesqueries that Waters put into his films, but the feel was still the same.

This is not to say that there was absolutely nothing to enjoy about the movie. The Sweeney Todd character was the best thing, deliciously fun to watch in his depredations. And the scene where characters are quoting Othello was amusing. But even allowing for these enjoyable parts, the movie is just lousy.

More interesting than the movie itself was watching Keith talk about its director, Andy Milligan. Milligan, as Keith tells it, was sociopathically hateful of everyone. Keith told us, using full body language of legendary fights Milligan had with business associates, and how Milligan would demand that organized crime figures pay him what they owed him. That was fun.

Ratings

Me: 3.5

Bob: 2.3

Christina: 7.8

Ethan: 8