Tag Archives: The Ghastly One

Book Review: The Ghastly One

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The Ghastly One: The 42nd Street Netherworld of Director Andy Milligan
Revised Edition Published by FAB Press, 2022. 256 pages.
By Jimmy McDonough

This has been one long journey. I started reading this revised edition back in 2023, but for some reason, I kept putting it down for a variety of reasons. There were other projects that got in the way, books I needed to get to that were sent to me to review, and life in general. But first and foremost, it was probably just because it is such a depressing story!

I knew of Milligan from seeing a few of his movie titles on VHS back in the day, namely The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (1972) but never watched too many of them. In 2021, when Severin Films released their box set, The Dungeon of Andy Milligan, that featured 14 of his films, I knew I would pick it up. By that time, I had really become interested in a lot of these different low budget filmmakers, such as Steckler, Adamson, Buchanan, and knew that Milligan was one that I really wanted to learn more about. And I wasn’t let down by what I saw.

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Andy Milligan Rises Again!

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If you would have told me a decade ago that I would be praising the work of Staten Island bottom of the basement auteur Andy Milligan, I would have said you’re crazy. I had known about him and a few of his titles but just wrote him off as another low-budget schlocky filmmaker. But a couple of years ago, Severin Films did an amazing thing by releasing a massive box set of Milligan’s work, with a ton of extras. These films looked better than they probably did if/when they played in theaters. As I started to go through the set, I realized that while they are still very low budgeted films, and weren’t the best on the technical side, there was a charm to them that I really started to enjoy. I’ve always said that the more you know about an artist, it will make you appreciate their work a little more. And between that box set and Jimmy McDonough’s book The Ghastly One, I really started to enjoy what I was seeing.

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