Sleaze, Shock, Soul: an Underground Portrait

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MOVIE REVIEW
The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan
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Genre: Documentary
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 40m
Director(s): Grayson Tyler Johnson, Josh Johnson
Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: This one doesn’t just walk the line into chaos—it opens the door, throws out the script, and invites it to stay a while. From the first moments, this documentary drags you into the margins of cinema history and refuses to let you look away. What emerges isn’t a glossy recap of a well-known icon or a clean-cut origin story, but a ragged, bloodied love letter to a provocateur who didn’t just push boundaries—he gleefully stomped on them.

Rather than offering up a sanitized legacy, the film plunges into the contradiction of its subject: a self-destructive artist, a notorious pessimist, and a queer trailblazer. What makes the documentary work is its willingness to embrace the mess, both in tone and construction. The narrative jumps through eras and perspectives, cutting from lo-fi horror snippets to intimate, sometimes painful, recollections. The structure echoes the subject’s aesthetic—fragmented, confrontational, but never boring.

The directors, Grayson Tyler Johnson and Josh Johnson, play it smart by not softening the edges. They let Andy Milligan speak for himself through a rare archival recording that turns the spotlight into something more like a confessional. It’s not a flattering portrait, but it’s layered and alive in its own way. The voice we hear is sharp, unfiltered, and direct—exactly the kind of presence you’d expect from someone who made a career out of turning low budgets into high-impact provocation.

There’s an electricity in how the film plays with texture. Sharp cuts, grimy footage, jagged audio—none of it is incidental. These choices mirror Milligan’s visual language: erratic camera work, claustrophobic sets, and gore effects that look like they were sourced from a high school art class gone off the rails. It’s not pretty, and it’s not supposed to be. This is cinema as chaos, built on instinct rather than perfection.

What keeps the film from slipping into spectacle is its cast of commentators—friends, collaborators, lovers, and those who barely survived the chaos. They don’t hold back. Some speak with affection, others with exhausted reverence, and a few with outright disdain. Still, even in critique, there’s a twisted passion—like watching someone drive a car off a cliff and being unable to look away.

It’s not just about the work, though. The documentary digs deep into how a toxic upbringing, internalized conflict, and a hostile industry shaped the person and creator. His erratic behavior, often violent and deeply unsettling, is presented without excuse—but also without erasure. Instead, the film suggests that he channeled all that chaos directly into his art, turning trauma into catharsis through blood-drenched melodramas and DIY horror flicks that no studio would dare touch.

A deeper dive into the impact his work had on queer audiences, underground cinema, and the exploitation genre as a whole might have added more weight to the story itself. I would have loved to see the parts covering his early years in theater and television dig deeper into the origin story that never fully takes shape.

The film captures something essential: a world where creativity had to claw its way into existence. Scraps of leftover film, duct-taped sets, and actors working for next to nothing speak to a kind of defiant filmmaking that feels as urgent as it does chaotic. It’s not about making something beautiful; it’s about creating something that can’t be ignored.

What elevates the project is how it handles identity. It doesn’t paint Milligan as an icon who always got it right. It portrays a flawed, angry man created from desperation and rage, whose queerness wasn’t marketable but raw, difficult, and real. His life didn’t fit a mold, and his films didn’t either. That makes the story far more compelling than a carefully curated legacy ever could.

When the credits roll, you’re left with a strange mix of emotions. You are guaranteed to want to look for his films—if only to understand what made this guy tick. (Severin has an incredible set that I’ve owned for years but have yet to crack into. That changes this weekend! The Dungeon Of Andy Milligan Collection (9-Disc Collector’s Edition) The documentary doesn’t demand reverence; it dares you to engage, question, and confront what art can be when it’s born from pain and spit-polished with rage.

It’s a love letter written in smudged ink or those little letters out of a magazine like a ransom note, a defiant middle finger to safe storytelling. The documentary becomes more than a tribute by owning its subject’s contradictions and celebrating his defiance. It’s a challenge to see the value in ugliness and find order in the mainstream that is cast aside. For those who like their cinema weird, dirty, and unapologetically queer, this hits the mark with precision.

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[photo courtesy of SEVERIN FILMS]

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