MILLIGAN MARCH: SEEDS (1968) ** ½

The old, horrible, alcoholic, wheelchair bound matriarch (Maggie Rogers) of a family of no-good louts goes ballistic when she learns her scheming children (whom she calls “bad seeds”) will be visiting her for Christmas.  After a thoroughly unpleasant dinner, the children retire to their rooms where we see that their mother has good reason to be upset as they basically act like sex-mad degenerates.  Before long, family members wind up being bumped off by an unseen killer, adding to the familial strife.   

Seeds is essentially the prototypical Andy Milligan movie.  It has a lot of the themes that would permeate his work, namely domineering mothers, incest, and a family with a checkered history gathering under one roof, only to be stalked by a killer.  When Milligan worked through those themes later in his career, it was usually in films full of garish color, cheesy costumes, and cheap gore.  What makes this one work slightly better than his later stuff is that the gritty, handheld, black and white aesthetic of Seeds feels better suited to the themes Milligan is exploring.  Whereas his later pictures felt like amateurish home movies parading around as horror, this feels like underground cinema that was mis-marketed as sexploitation. 

For example, the scenes of Candy Hammond (Milligan’s wife) taking a bath, reading muscleman magazines in the nude, and seducing her own siblings is the sort of thing you would expect to see in a New York skin flick at the time.  However, the fringy touches Milligan lends to these sequences sometimes makes it feel closer to Andy Warhol than Michael Findlay.  The acting is better too (for the most part), even if most of the cast is prone to over-the-top histrionics.  

Seeds still suffers from many of the same flaws that mar many of Milligan’s pictures.  Namely, the pacing drags considerably thanks to the overly talky nature of the film.  While it might not be up to snuff with his sexploitation work like Nightbirds or Fleshpot on 42nd Street, it’s a little bit more offbeat, interesting, and better than his straight-up horror films like Torture Dungeon and The Ghastly Ones.  

Milligan Motifs:  As far as the story goes, we have a domineering mother figure, incest, a family gathering where a killer begins picking them off one by one, and servants who are secretly scheming against their employer.  On the technical side of things, it was yet another one of the films that Milligan made in Staten Island.  Also, his knack for using library music, allowing his actors to give overly theatrical performances, awkwardly adding in “hot” inserts into the lovemaking scenes, and odd camera placement (sometimes it feels like you’re looking directly up at the actors) crop up again.

Milligan Stock Company:  Hammond was also in Milligan’s Gutter Trash, The Promiscuous Sex, and Compass Rose.  Rogers was also in Tricks of the Trade, The Ghaslty Ones, and most memorably, Torture Dungeon.  Neil Flanagan appeared in a slew of his movies including Guru the Mad Monk, Torture Dungeon, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street.  

AKA:  Seeds of Sin.