The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan (2025)

The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan had its world première at Tribeca 2025, 11 June

“it was absolutely, just awful, it was just terrible,” says marketing consultant and distributor Samuel S. Sherman some way into Josh Johnson and Grayson Tyler Johnson’s documentary The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan, adding, “If the sound is bad, and the acting is bad, and the people are almost non-actors, every one of them, and it doesn’t look professional, then I draw the line. I’ve got to draw a line someplace.”

Sherman is speaking of Milligan’s The Degenerates (1967), which Sherman describes as “supposedly a sex film set in the future”, and whose title Sherman had suggested, believing, as he drily states, that ‘degenerates’ described both the film’s makers, and those viewers most likely to be drawn to it. Sherman would later suggest the title for Milligan’s first colour (and first horror) film The Ghastly Ones (1968), his thinking being that “it had ones in it, and it was ghastly.”

It might seem odd for a documentary on Milligan to platform prominently so hilariously arch (in every sense) a critic of Milligan’s films, but then Milligan had few defenders. Even Stephen Thrower, author of Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents (2007) and seemingly a natural ally, concedes that Milligan’s films “aren’t cinematic”, and suggests that a normal response to them is to say, “What the fuck is he doing? What’s going on with this film? This is crazy!” – even if Thrower ultimately champions these films precisely for their singularity.

This is the paradox of the Johnsons’ subject: whether a foundational figure in off-off-Broadway theatre, or an ultra-low-budget, bottom-of-the-barrel practitioner in sexploitation cinema and grindhouse horror, Mulligan was a figure of and on the margins, endlessly pursuing his creative urges safely beyond the gaze or even the notice of the mainstream – and yet here he is, placed centre stage as it were in the documentary to be closely scrutinised for where his peculiar vision came from and what he achieved. Even if much of his cinematic output from the Sixties is considered lost¹, this collates surviving clips, testimony from his collaborators Gerald Jaccuzo, Hope Stansbury, John Borske, Bob Likala and Ken Lane, from his friend and biographer Jimmy McDonough, and from his historian Alex DiSanto – and we also hear extracts from an archival audio interview with Milligan himself (who died in 1991 from complications relating to AIDS, only to be buried anonymously and ignominiously in a pauper’s grave).

What emerges is a portrait of a complicated man: the abusive home life he could not leave soon enough; his honourable discharge from the Navy in 1951; his early career as a television actor and his work in experimental theatre; and his open homosexuality, coupled with his bizarre year-long marriage to actress Candy Hammond, apparently as a mutual “lark”. Mulligan began shooting with a 16mm Auricon news camera whose handheld portability and “crap” optical sound recording would become the rough-and-ready signature of his first decade or so of film work – and while he certainly had personal problems and mother issues that he was working through with his art, the only way that that this untrained, polyhyphenate filmmaker could get distributor William Mishkin to fund these weird little melodramas (minimally) funded and to screen them on the Times Square grindhouse circuit was to put in sex scenes.

Later Milligan would turn to horror, peppering his works with extremely cheap gore effects. For The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972), originally shot (and finished) in the UK as a werewolf film, Mishkin insisted that Milligan add a whole new subplot involving rodents to cash in on the recent popularity of Daniel Mann’s Willard (1971), in what Thrower describes as “one of the most bizarre conceptual mash-ups in Milligan’s career”.

Milligan would jump through all these hoops as the necessary obstacles for getting his own message out there, on a wing and a prayer. He always used leftover film reels acquired from other productions to save money, would often shoot in tight, crowded frames in his period films to limit the costs of set dressing, and would typically deploy his signature ‘swirly cam’ – excitably, blurrily rotating the camera rather than focusing on the action – during dramatic senes, to the equal bemusement and irritation of critics.

Yet these films, for all their churned-out saleability as lurid exploitation, were also deeply personal projects, and no one else was making anything quite like them. And while it becomes clear that Milligan could be angry and even violent on set, and was a difficult person all round, McDonough also stresses how much fun it was to be in his company. It is a fascinating glimpse into the life of an artist who was constantly having to contend with his own demons as well as with the brute reality of market forces, and who had to compromise all the time just to keep going, while producing a kind of odd, almost outsider art that most would describe, in all its idiosyncrasy, precisely as uncompromising.

strap: Josh Johnson & Grayson Tyler Johnson’s documentary places the late outsider filmmaker centre stage, reconstructing the life of an artist always on the edge