Rating: 
Summary: A MASTERPIECE
Review: ...since when are biographies required to provide HEROES? If you are interested in film, art, people, sex, insanity, the politics of pornography and 42nd Street, BUY THIS BOOK. It is unforgettable and even made me cry at the end. A TRUE CLASSIC. Rarely has an artist (however "bad") gotten such an incisive, loving--yet brutal--tribute.
Rating:
Summary: A MASTERPIECE
Review: ...since when are biographies required to provide HEROES? If you are interested in film, art, people, sex, insanity, the politics of pornography and 42nd Street, BUY THIS BOOK. It is unforgettable and even made me cry at the end. A TRUE CLASSIC. Rarely has an artist (however "bad") gotten such an incisive, loving--yet brutal--tribute.
Rating: 
Summary: We need to find some better heroes.
Review: Any Milligan was a terrible filmmaker, and his snail-paced movies, which blended trash and pompous period costumes, can only be called unwatchable.His final film, Monstrosity, was truly the work of an incoherent brain, blending rape, hypodermic needles, and a grinning slapstick monster wearing a Fred Flintstone suit. McDonough's book is fascinating at first, but then one realizes that these aren't artists being described with such misguided affection. Like Warhol's crowd, Milligan's world was populated by uneducated drug addicts, and people obsessed with their own fractured sexuality. One of these days, there'll be a book about a true underground filmmaker, but in the meantime, we're stuck with the sniveling praise of sycophants like John Waters, and books like this which glorify the excretions of talentless slobs.
Rating:
Summary: haunting/brutal/honest
Review: As a straight male I could have done without some of the gay passages, I could have also done without some of Milligan's stepbrother's sick and twisted admissions--and yet, having said that, what was the author supposed to do? Cover up the less than pleasant parts of his subject's background? I think not. It's a facinating tale that will haunt you long after you have finished the book. Extremely well done; unputdownable. If you're interested in low-budget filmmaking and appreciate what these filmmakers have to go through to make their dreams happen on zero budgets...this is the book for you. The other would be on Al Adamson, and, of course, Ed Wood.
Rating:
Summary: Milligan every bit as ghastly as the title implies.
Review: Jimmy McDonough does a superlative job of bringing the fascinating life of the late and almost completely unmissed misanthropic sexploitation/schlock horror movie maker Andy Milligan to light. Reader be warned, this is an unflinching look at life in the nightmarish rough trade underworld of New York. Milligan started in amateur theater before helping to create the boiling milieu that birthed the Off-Broadway Theater movement in the early sixties. Then he moved to the 42nd street grindhouses, making exploitation 'classics' that are eye scalding in their badness and impossible to forget, no matter how hard you try. Yet McDonough continually points out that, as bad as Milligan's movies were, they could only be made by Andy, being infused with the writer/director's utter contempt for women, family, and just about everything else humanity offered. Being a recalcitrant and secretive subject for McDonough, Milligan (as the author warns) sometimes fades from the narrative, but never from the world he inhabits. By the time Milligan leaves theater for the exploitation movie business we can fully understand why McDonough found Milligan such a hypnotically fascinating figure. For fans of exploitation movies, The Ghastly One is an essential book. Highest recommendation.
Rating:
Summary: The definitive book on a misunderstood filmmaker.
Review: Many may be unfamiliar with the work of low-brow filmmaker Andy Milligan but he made a lasting impression (can be taken two ways!) on my film watching experience as an impressionable teen gorehound in the 70's/80's. To say his films are abysmal wouldn't be innacurate but,by the same token, there's something about them that stays with you long after you've watched them. An edge, a tone that exists under the surface and in the ways his characters interact that made on beleive that Milligan was more than just an exploitation filmmaker. Jimmy McDonough got to know Milligan and has revealed ALL in this amazing book. From Milligan's obvious hatred of women, his misantrhopy, sadistic personality, promiscous lifestyle, the works. The discussion of the films is fascinating, but more so the relationship between subject and biographer that developed. McDonough was there right to the very end.
Milligan was a true visionary, a fact that audiences would be blind to in their haste to call him a "bad filmmaker". He was a true sadist and his films prove this.
The best film-related book of recent times.
Rating: 
Summary: Oh Please!
Review: Oh Please! I was a lead actress in Monstrosity. There is not much to write about Andy. He was as basic as peanut butter and jelly. Not complex. Not dark. He paid us on time and was nice to be around. His movies were awful. He was well intentioned. Doing a Milligan film was a memorable "Hello to Hollywood" for us young upstarts who were new to town and short on cash -- and the competition to get into one was tough. (As ridiculous as that sounds.) We could act -- but he directed us in a way that made us look and sound -- AWFUL -- and we were embarrassed when we saw the end result. However, there was No mystique. No need for book about Andy.
Rating:
Summary: Ouch!
Review: Stayed up all night with a flashlight even, because a power outage knocked out all the electricity on our block, and yet I didn't want to stop finding out more and more about Andy Milligan (and about Jimmy McDonough, his biographer). By the end of the book my right hand was SO TIRED!He's interviewed everyone, dug deep into some unsavory caves and dells, and come up and out the other side. I don't ever want necessarily to SEE any of Milligan's outre films now, but I have the great satisfaction of having read a splendid biography.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant Look at Sordid Chapter in Film History
Review: This is a beautifully written, brutally honest, well-researched, wholly unsentimental, and non-judgemental portrait of low-budget sexploitation filmmaker Andy Milligan. While some of the violence and depravity displayed by Milligan and his players is portrayed in such graphic detail as to occasionally make the reader feel thoroughly soiled, McDonough's book is like a particularly devastating car wreck-it's a horrifying spectacle from which it's impossible to turn away. After having read this, I have no desire to see a single scene from an Andy Milligan movie, but found this book to be an incredibly rewarding look at the seamy underbelly of low-budget American cinema, as well as the fascinating putative beginnings of New York's off-Broadway theater. McDonough does a remarkable job chronicling the offbeat, the eccentric, the forgotten, and I'm now especially eager to read the author's long-time-forthcoming biography of Neil Young.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Look at Sordid Chapter in Film History
Review: This is a beautifully written, brutally honest, well-researched, wholly unsentimental, and non-judgemental portrait of low-budget sexploitation filmmaker Andy Milligan. While some of the violence and depravity displayed by Milligan and his players is portrayed in such graphic detail as to occasionally make the reader feel thoroughly soiled, McDonough's book is like a particularly devastating car wreck-it's a horrifying spectacle from which it's impossible to turn away. After having read this, I have no desire to see a single scene from an Andy Milligan movie, but found this book to be an incredibly rewarding look at the seamy underbelly of low-budget American cinema, as well as the fascinating putative beginnings of New York's off-Broadway theater. McDonough does a remarkable job chronicling the offbeat, the eccentric, the forgotten, and I'm now especially eager to read the author's long-time-forthcoming biography of Neil Young.
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