THE RATS ARE COMING! THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE! (1972)
Article #1776 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-24-2006
Posting Date: 6-23-2006
Directed by Andy Milligan
Featuring Hope Stansbury, Jackie Skarvellis, Noel Collins

A man marries into a family of werewolves.

Is Andy Milligan the worst director of all time? I guess that depends on your point of view. This is the second movie of his I’ve seen, and some of the observations I made still stand; as a writer, he can’t really structure his stories well, but he actually wrote some fairly good dialogue on occasion, and some of the acting is far better than I would have anticipated; in particular, I like Douglas Phair’s performance as the strange patriarch of the family. He also avoids one of the biggest problems of bad directors; he makes sure his actors pay attention to the pace and pick up their cues. On this level alone, he is far better than Jerry Warren. However, the bad sound and his inability to vary the pace of the dialogue results in a greater level of annoyance as the movie proceeds, and his attempts at humor are abysmal. The action sequences are so hideously photographed that they are almost impossible to follow. And, in this film, I do take a strong issue with his treatment of animals, especially the scene where a rat is tormented with a knife before being killed onscreen. There’s really no excuse for this type of unpleasantness. Still, I can’t bring myself to call him the worst director of all time, and I still find this movie easier to endure than, say, THE HEADLESS EYES.