MILLIGAN MARCH: BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS (1970) * ½

Bloodthirsty Butchers is writer/director Andy Milligan’s version of Sweeney Todd:  The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.  Todd (John Miranda) is in cahoots with baker Maggie Lovett (Jane Hilary).  He slices his customers’ throats in the barber shop, and she bakes the bodies into her famous meat pies.  Problems ensue when customers start finding human hair and boobies in their baked goods.  

With this film, Milligan continues his tradition of starting things off with a bang (in this case, a pretty good hand hacking scene) before immediately letting things get bogged down with a lot of boring soap opera melodrama.  You would think that Sweeney Todd would be a can’t miss proposition for Milligan, seeing as his horror films are often 19th century costume dramas with occasional dashes of gore.  Even though the story is tailormade for Milligan’s sensibilities, he is unable to make it work, thanks in no small part to the frequent dull, talky passages in between the murder set pieces.  Or put another way:  You get a little gore, but it’s mostly a bore.  

It’s been a while since I saw it last, but I forgot that it takes FOREVER before the body parts start turning up in the meat pies.  Heck, Miranda and Hilary don’t even share any scenes together until the last act.  Before that, it’s just a lot of love triangles, rectangles, and pentagons as the young romantic leads’ premarital woes and Todd and Lovett’s marital strife seem to take precedence over the whacking, hacking, and body stacking.  There are ultimately just too many side characters and subplots that gum up the works.  I know he was probably just trying to flesh out the characters (or more likely, pad out the running time), but the further Milligan strays from the central premise, the worse the movie gets. 

Notable Milligan motifs:  Like Nightbirds, Milligan shot the film in England.  As with The Body Beneath and Torture Dungeon, it’s essentially a 19th century costume drama with high school drama level costumes and acting that’s punctuated by occasional gore scenes.  Milligan’s overuse of library music and inexplicable shots of the camera looking straight up the actor’s noses also permeate the film.  As for his stock company players:  Miranda later turned up in The Weirdo and Surgikill, Berwick Kaler was previously seen in Nightbirds and The Body Beneath, and William Barrel also turned up in The Body Beneath.

AKA:  The Blood Butcher.  

Here’s my first stab at reviewing the film, which was originally posted on July 17th, 2007 on my old site.  As you can see, my feelings on the flick haven’t changed:  

BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS  (1970)  * ½

In 19th century London, Sweeney Todd (Happy Days’ John Miranda) cuts hair and throats and makes off with his customer’s valuables.  Meanwhile Ms. Maggie Lovett sells human meat pies to her clueless customers.  They fall in love and kill each other’s respective spouses.  Everyone else seems to be in love with everyone else’s spouses too, so the movie is basically a soap opera with high school drama class production values and costumes.  A couple of choice gore scenes (hands hacked off, a human breast in a meat pie, meat cleaver to the face) and Todd’s speech about “women’s happiness” saves this from being a total loss.  Director Andy (The Ghastly Ones) Milligan returned to the 19th century in The Rats are Coming!  The Werewolves are Here!