⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
There’s something very wrong with Andy Milligan and that’s exactly why I love his peculiar library of gutter thrills. If you’ve read Jimmy McDonough’s irreplaceable The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan, then you know how the man’s wretched past inspired his wretched working days and eventually lead to his wretched death. It’s a fascinating look at the power a shitty mother has in developing an awful human who, for some reason, decided to be a filmmaker. Outside of a few dramatic pieces steeped in an odd level of unearned pretentiousness, Milligan stuck to horror that ran through themes of family rot, mental decay and a general nihilism for anything that had the tenacity to breath on this planet. He also utilized handmade period piece costuming, church basement spook show gore effects and scripts that were already pretty dated by the time of conception. It sounds like a train wreck you’re being forced to watch by a drunk nun who is also your uncle in drag… and it is but it’s completely unlike anything else I’ve seen. Well, a Milligan film is like everything else festering in low budget hell but it’s being crafted by Milligan so nothing else is like it. I don’t know if that makes sense and I doubt I should care. I’m sure Milligan wouldn’t have given a fuck, he was probably too busy planning on choking out his nephew. Carnage is Andy Milligan pissing all over marriage. Gay, straight, horse… I don’t think Andy cared. Before the opening credits hit, a groom shoots his wife in the head while they embrace and then the dopey dink turns the gun on himself. They’re in their wedding clothes and in their own home listening to that toe tapping hit The Wedding March. It’s also all consensual and done out of love. Things are not well in Staten Island. Three years pass and a newlywed couple (Carol and Jonathan) move into the home where the murder suicide played out. Fresh starts being what they are, the couple are excited for their new life together… Andy Milligan laughs and spits in all four of their eyes at the same time. There’s something wrong in the house and no it’s not the cluttered interior design and uncomfortable furniture, the spirits of those dead people are doing terrifying things as soon as the couple moves in. Phonographs play by themselves, the stove turns itself on, a discarded bubble bath burps and a home phone hangs itself up… please, just say to yourself “It’s only a movie.” I heard it helps if you repeat it. The couple survive the super exciting supernatural murder attempt of haunted gas stoves and closed windows but blame it on faulty kitchen appliances or maybe Carol’s forgetfulness. She disagrees but she’s also a woman so why would the mustachioed men listen to her? Strange things continue to happen but why focus on that when you can focus on the rocky relationship between Jonathan’s pregnant sister and awful mother. That way you don’t have to produce any dime-store special effects and you can focus your static camera on the arguments. Thanks, Andy! Jonathan (who looks like Albert Eskinazi if he were being played by everyone’s uncle) goes off to work leaving Carol to deal with the spooky shenanigans of the house. Paper slides under tablemats so she can’t take a note, garden shears slide out of eye-line after sliding into eye-line, a candelabra lazily moves across a table, water spills from a fallen teapot… the horrors persist. After a knife falls into her hand and blood spills shoddily, Carol gets worried… kind of. Jonathan (who resembles a well-fed Polonia cousin) just thinks it’s nothing to worry about. Phantom screams in the dead of night do little to light any fire under the collective asses of our heroes. An elderly housekeeper named Rose Novak (hey, the movie thought it was important) is attacked in the cellar by the phantom bride with an echoing voice in an awkwardly staged bit of paranormal stupidity. It’s so shocking she slits her own throat with a straight razor. Burglars who look like budget sex thugs show up too and come to a messy end. Why? Because it’s Staten Island viewed through the trash aesthetic goggles of Andy Milligan and even if you don’t mind wasting time on conversations that hold little interest or story progression, people still have to die messily. After a long stretch of nothing posing as horror combined with humanity at its most agitated and romance that hits with all the eroticism of finding a used condom in your grilled cheese, a house warming party happens and bad things follow. There’s still like thirty minutes left that could be three hundred for all I can tell. There’s still time for a decapitation, city hall research, a priest, cancer, floating furniture and a meat cleaver to the noggin. It’s a diseased dumpster spin on The Amityville Horror with a budget consisting of favors and convenience by people who only read about Amityville during the boring parts of whatever basement pornography they were watching. I love it but there’s no way in hell I’d ever recommend it. Yep. It’s a Milligan!
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