Three sisters and their husbands go to a lawyer for the reading of their father’s will. He stipulates they all must go to a mansion on an island in the middle of nowhere and have lots of sex. (Unfortunately, they don’t really follow through on that.) Little do they know the servants’ brother is a deranged, rabbit-eating psychopath. Could he be the one in a black robe that’s sneaking around at night and bumping the family members off?
The Ghastly Ones is a prototypical work of writer/director Andy Milligan. It contains many of his hallmarks, namely soap opera plotting, Staten Island locations, amateurish acting, and cheesy gore scenes. Milligan was certainly more ambitious than many of his gore film contemporaries as a lot of his horror movies were period piece costume dramas. While that doesn’t necessarily make them “good”, it makes them uniquely Milligan.
Milligan often served as his own cinematographer, and for this film, his camerawork is all over the place. Some indoor scenes are lit and shot like a strange Avant Garde play with odd angles and characters standing against black backgrounds. The outdoor scenes are kind of funny as the characters are often lumped together into frame so that the modern-day buildings and architecture doesn’t show in the background.
Like many a Milligan movie, The Ghastly Ones is a bit of a chore to sit through. There is a little bit of nudity and the occasional gore scene to ensure you don’t fall asleep, but even then, I came quite close to nodding off at several junctures. Ultimately, the gore (which includes eyeball ripping, stomach slashing, and a severed head, among others) just isn’t good (or bad) enough to make it memorable, and all the boring drama in between tends to get downright insufferable at times.
In short, The Ghastly Ones is ghastly all right… just for all the wrong reasons.
AKA: Blood Rites. AKA: Blood Orgy.
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