While on a stay in London, Staten Islander Andy Milligan made a couple of films for Leslie Elliot, owner of the Compton Cinema Club in Soho’s Old Compton Street, and his new company Cinemedia – Nightbirds (1970), which had only been shown in a cinema once, and the vampire film The Body Beneath, another film he shot at speed in a busy 1970. Milligan had been on a five-year contract with Elliot but things fell apart after just two films when Elliot’s father took a dislike to the director. Out of work and with no immediate way home, Milligan went back to his old producing partner William Mishkin who financed three more films shot in the UK. First out of the gate was Bloodthirsty Butchers, a twisted take on the story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Sweeney Todd. Most of was shot in the UK with a mostly British cast (so the accents are mostly decent enough, even if the performances aren’t) but when Milligan returned home, the finished product ran short, necessitating extra filming back in Staten Island, mostly of the back-stage scenes at the theatre.

It follows more or the less the established beats of the Sweeney Todd story with the maniacal barber (John Miranda, who’s surprisingly quite good in the role) murdering his customers and passing on their remains to the meat pie shop run by his mistress Maggie Lovett (Jane Hilary) and her butcher Tobias (Berwick Kaler, a regular in Milligan’s British ventures). Things get complicated as Milligan piles on the melodrama, with Tobias having an affair with Rose (Ann Arrow) while lusting after shopgirl Johanna Jeffrey (Annabella Wood), who in turn is engaged to be married to Jarvis (Michael Cox). Todd meanwhile is cheating on both Maggie and his drunken wife Becky (Susan Driver) with music hall singer Anna (Susan Cassidy) who is sleeping with her manager (Frank Echols) – don’t worry if you’re not keeping up with all this, it really makes no difference if can work out the soap opera shenanigans. Characters drift in and out of the somewhat hazy narrative, some barely hanging around for more than a single scene, leaving one to suspect – as one often does with Milligan’s films – that they’re only there because Milligan had them handy for a day’s work.

If you’ve seen one Milligan film, you can probably guess how all this is going to play out. Uninteresting characters (the quality of the acting is highly variable) talk endlessly, mundane chit chat alternating with the sort of bilious rants that you’d expect from this most angry and troubled of directors. A few crude gore scenes are spattered about here and there, but they never rise above the level of a local amateur dramatics society who have come across a make-up kit and given it to someone with only the vaguest idea of what to do with it.

Milligan almost seemed to revel in his lack of technical prowess – you’d think that at least one of his films might rise to the level of competence even by accident. But no. Like all his work, Bloodthirsty Butchers is riddled with technical blunders, features an apparently deliberate disregard for continuity, and is blighted by substandard sound and framing that might charitably be described as eccentric. This sort of thing has a strange charm for a few minutes as you wonder just how anyone could make a film so inept but it’s a fascination that wears off very quickly. After twenty or so minutes of amateur hour acting, florid dialogue and scenes that have very little to do with each other there’s really little left to enjoy.

Seen as the work of an enthusiastic if talent-free amateur, Milligan’s films might just pass muster as some sort of camp, but by God they’re dull. Milligan had made his start in films with low-rent sexploitation like The Naked Witch (1967), The Degenerates (1967) and The Promiscuous Sex (1967) so one might expect that he’d at least have been able to put together a sex scenes with some competence. But here they’re laughably reticent, the participants clearly uncomfortable, Milligan seemingly still not quite sure how he should be shooting these things. His ineptitude extends to his choice of library music cues, which are often intrusive always inappropriate and the only thing about the film more grating than some of the performances.

The shoddy camerawork was partly mandated by the need to keep anything that smacks of the 1970s out of shot (it didn’t always work – look at the motor scooter visible in Guru the Mad Monk (1970) set in the 15th century), something Milligan was very open about. In his biography of the director, The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan, Jimmy McDonough quotes Milligan as saying, “the reason you work so close in low budget is there’s no sets, you can’t show anything.” Which explains his plethora of far from flattering extreme close-ups, the actors frozen in the foreground as the camera tries to dodge around anything that smacks of the modern world.

The Bloodthirsty Butchers was Milligan’s film shot on 35mm film and betrays a possibly admiration for the great barnstormer Tod Slaughter who had made his screen debut in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in 1936. Bloodthirsty Butchers isn’t a patch on that one and even Milligan himself wasn’t too keen on it – again according to McDonough, he felt it to be “very claustrophobic, it doesn’t have quality to it.” He wasn’t wrong, though coupled with another Milligan film, Torture Dungeon (1970), it did good business at the US box office thanks to an ad campaign that promised a lot more than it could ever hope to deliver. Gore fans would have noticed that Mrs Lovett talks of “258 people disappearing,” but couldn’t fail to spot that we only see him kill one customer on screen…