FLESHPOT ON 42ND STREET (1973) excerpt

Made before BLOOD, FLESHPOT... was produced by the notorious William Miskin and featured XXX Superstar of the era Harry Reems. This was his last William Miskin Pictures production and the excellent THE GHASTLY ONE: THE SEX-GORE NETHERWORLD OF ANDY MILLIGAN (2001) quotes a positive review from VARIETY of this title, which is still high on my want list.

BLOOD was shot in 35mm double system and actually looks and sounds pretty good, for an Andy Milligan film. You can hear all the dialogue clearly. That's a big deal if you've seen Milligan's previous no-budget horrors (cf THE RATS ARE COMING; THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE).

We have a werewolf, a female vampire and room full of carnivorous plants and a visit from the Frankenstein family. What more can one ask of a horror film?

Gore: meat cleaver in the skull, Hope Stansbury slicing a mouse in two (without an edit) and eating the tail end [!]; hands chopped off; shot of a man half eaten by the plants [which look like the plastic variety you see in most dollar stores].

My favorite scenes are a werewolf attack in a fog so thick you can't see the wolfman and the final battle between the son of Larry and the daughter of the Count. Things happen fast in this film. A door opens and suddenly a room fills with a wolfman or a vampire woman shrouded in mist. There's a lot of amusing dialogue, pretty good acting and cut-rate action in just under an hour of runtime. Many of the surprisingly handsome, in-depth compositions are framed by the trademark Milligan roses.

Milligan always designed his own wardrobes and sometimes took greater care with them than with the actors who wore them or the photography. But that's not the case here. The period costumes (by "Raffine") include a rather impressive Southern Gothic crimson cut worn by the great Ms. Stansbury.

This is in a similar aesthetic modality to Jess Franco's DRACULA CONTRA FRANKENSTEIN. A highly recommended double bill.

(c) Robert Monell, 2008