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Old 04.22.2014, 07:10 AM   #17952
MellySingsDoom
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"Guru, The Mad Monk" (dir. Andy Milligan, 1970) - truly awe-boggling stuff from the Staten Island supremo. In fact, here's me review of it here:

An entry into the "Witchfinder General"/"Mark Of The Devil" stakes by everyone's favourite Staten Island-based director, and it sure is a "unique" item indeed. This one concerns Father Guru (Neil Flanagan) - who actually is really a bishop, not a monk! - whose day-to-day activities involves rounding up various unfortunates, absolving them of their supposed "sins" (one gets absolved for the "sin" of peeping!), then performs various unpleasantries on them in the name of Christ. He's aided and abetted in all this by his right-hand foil Olga (Jacqueline Webb), who provides "glamour" and sleaze in equal measure, and Igor (Jack Spencer), a leprous hunchback, who seems to be loyal to Father Guru. Various victims come and go, and Father Guru (a dead ringer at times for UK actor Rodney Bewes) chews the scenery about sin, redemption and teaching them damn villagers a thing or two about the Good Lord. Ultimately, the victims wreak their revenge on the good Guru, and he ends up meeting a truly ridiculous demise at the hands of Igor. At this point the film crashes to a sudden halt and ends.

This film bears many of the hallmarks of an Andy Milligan effort - choppy, sometimes incoherent editing, some rather wobbly camera work, a script (put together by Milligan himself) full of ripe and ludicrous emoting and dialogue, and a large amount of random stock library music. The violence/gore scenes are truly inept - I can't believe that Milligan spent more than $10 on the special effects work - and the performances (by a group of unknowns, as per usual) range from the bored/confused to the rather deranged. At 57 minutes, the film oddly enough feels about the right length; any longer, and it really would have begun to drag out considerably.

You'd think that, going by the above, "Guru...." is a laughable, incompetent, grade-Z exploitation mess that deserves to be forgotten about, and indeed, 98% of film fans would agree with you. But Milligan's work has always held a fascination for me - his themes of repression, desire, conflict and ever-present violence run throughout his films, and whilst I'm never going to buy into the (utterly ridiculous) claims that Milligan was some type of zero-budget "auteur", he has shown thematic consistency throughout his career. In addition, Milligan's homosexuality (which he chose not to be open about, and he was also a frequenter of the NYC S&M scene) feeds into his work too - the sense of repressed guilt is present in this at times, and whilst he's no George Kuchar (and indeed, who is?), the gay angle of his film-making should be acknowledged. Tragically, Milligan passed away from AIDS in 1991, and spent the last couple of years of his life in considerable ill-health and poverty.

I've waited nearly 20 years to see "Guru, The Mad Monk", and was not disappointed. Milligan's films were nigh-on impossible to find in the UK for many, many years - the only one being distributed (by video) being "The Ghastly Ones" (under the re-titling of "Blood Rites") in the early 1980's, which itself ended up being clobbered under the Obscene Publications Act (for gore scenes reasons). It was only with the BFI Flipside DVD release of "The Body Beneath" a couple of years ago, that Milligan's work finally was available in general to a UK audience.

"Guru, The Mad Monk" most certainly is an acquired taste, to say the very least, but comes recommended to those interested in low-budget horror/exploitation cinema.
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