Guru (Neal Flanagan) is a corrupt priest who is willing to do stuff like save your condemned girlfriend’s life if the price is right. Sometimes, that price may be stealing cadavers or securing blood for a vampire woman. You know how it is. However, Guru is slowly going mad, and his condition is made worse when the Church replaces him with a younger priest.
Guru the Mad Monk starts off with an avalanche of exposition and it never quite recovers. Although it’s only fifty-six minutes long, it might’ve actually benefitted from some more fleshing out. I mean, you remember the old show biz motto: Show us, not tell us? Well, when you’re working with budgets as low as Andy Milligan did, all you can afford to do is tell us. Even with all the plot-heavy verbal diarrhea the characters spout, it's still hard for the audience to get their bearings. It also doesn’t help that the narrative is quite choppy, and Milligan rushes from scene to scene so quickly that you’re often in catch-up mode. And while the movie may be less than an hour long, it feels much longer thanks to the community theater level acting, high school drama costumes, and awful dialogue.
It also features some of the worst gore effects of Milligan’s career (which is a bold statement if there ever was one). The eyeball poking scene is some grade school level shit and the scene where a prisoner’s hands are hacked off might go down in cinema history as the worst special effect of all time. To make matters worse, the gore scenes are all too brief. It’s almost like Milligan forgot to put them in there and then just tossed a couple crappy effects in at the last minute. (If you blink, you’ll miss a really shitty decapitation.)
Flanagan is just awful in the lead. If Guru really was deranged as the title suggests, we might’ve been in business. However, we just never buy him as a Looney Tune. The scene where he talks to himself and his evil personality in the mirror feels more like a filmed rehearsal than something that any director in their right mind would put into their finished product.
When I originally reviewed this back in ’07, I gave it No Stars. Nowadays, I’m not as harsh as I used to be, although I still say Milligan’s The Rats are Coming-The Werewolves are Here is still one of the worst pieces of shit ever made. I wouldn’t put this on the same level as that crapfest as it’s not nearly as reprehensible (no animals are tortured this time out, thankfully), but it’s still one of Milligan’s worst, which is REALLY saying something.
Milligan Motifs: This was another one of Milligan’s no-budget costume dramas parading as a horror movie. It’s also the second Milligan movie in a row with a typo in the opening credits (“Sreenplay”). We also have a villain with a hunchback assistant, characters who have thick modern New York accents in 19th century Europe, and someone gets nailed to a wall.
Milligan Stock Company: Flanagan was in a bunch of Milligan flicks from The Ghastly Ones on up to Torture Dungeon and Gerald Jacuzzo, who plays the new priest, was also in Torture Dungeon and The Man with 2 Heads.
Here's a reprint of my original review of the film, which was first posted on August 18th, 2007:
GURU THE MAD MONK (1970) NO STARS
You know you’re in trouble when the opening credit for “Sreenplay” is spelled wrong!
Guru (Neil Flanagan) is a priest in the mythical land of Mortavia who executes criminals for the “mother church” and sells the bodies to a medical school. His son Carl (Paul Lieber) falls in love with Nadja (Judith Israel), a young criminal and begs his father to spare her. He agrees but only if his son collects blood for his vampire mistress! (How a vampire could live in a church is anybody’s guess.) When his superiors replace Guru with another priest, he kills to keep his place in the church. Guru also has a hunchback assistant named Igor (Jack Spenser) who also falls in love with Nadja. In the end, Guru gets his comeuppance when he’s hung in the church’s bell tower. I’ve seen a lot of terrible movies in my time but this is one of the worst.
It’s only 56 minutes, but it seems like a 12 hour mini-series. The inept gore scenes include eyes being poked out with sticks (they’re obviously ping pong balls) and a pretty lame crucifixion. All the characters have heavy Noo Yawk accents and the budget, costumes, sets and acting would be dwarfed next to any grade school drama production. Director Andy Milligan also did Bloodthirsty Butchers the same year.
AKA: Garu the Mad Monk.
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