Your universe's critics are oddly unimpressed by Mr. Milligan's efforts. For example, reviewer Hitchcoc writes, "Anyway, there's no end to the suffering, not of the people in the house, but of the people who saw this movie. Avoid at all costs." Reviewer hangsheep2004 writes, somewhat inexplicably, "This movie is so bad they do not even sell it in many places. Look out Plan 9 from outer Space, look out Manos, Hands of Fate, you have a contender for worst picture of all time. Carnage has that potential, the only potential it has." And reviewer BA_Harrison writes, "With lousy acting from all involved, and special effects limited to objects being moved by wires (some of which are clearly visible) and a fair amount of hokey gore (including a really laughable disembowelment, a meat cleaver in the head and a blood-free decapitation), this woeful ghost flick is strictly for fans of really bad movies."
Read on for an accurate appreciation of Andy Milligan's Carnage (1984)...
The film begins with shots of a big old house where a wedding ceremony is taking place (if one defines a wedding ceremony as a couple dressed in white kissing all alone while a wedding march plays on a record player). The groom picks up a revolver from the Old West and shoots his bride in the head, then shoots himself.
Three years later, director Andy Milligan shows the same establishing shots of the big old house. A new (or, more accurately, middle-aged) newlywed couple, Jonathan and Carol, moves in. After they enter the house, the mustachioed man, clearly drunk, picks up his wife, carries her outside, then carries her back inside, banging her legs on the door. Accompanied by their realtor, they sign the final sale papers inside the house.
After the realtor leaves, the couple uncover some of the furniture they have purchased. They find a wedding photo of the murder/suicide couple from the opening, who must have had a photographer over before (but not during) their ceremony. There follows a sequence of Carol making tea that was clearly inspired by the coffee-making sequence in Friday the 13th (1980) in that it happens in real-time. It is followed by a jump-scare as Carol sits on a sheet-covered chair for some reason, only to find that Jonathan has been waiting under the sheet in that very chair to startle her.
The doorbell rings.
“What’s that?” Jonathan asks.
“Somebody out front for us?” Carol answers his question with a curiously worded question. When they go to answer the door, the record player chillingly begins to play the wedding march.
They completely forget about the doorbell.
Mysterious occurrences begin to occur. The phone rings but nobody is on the line. Unfinished tea cups sit in the sink. Jonathan says, “Well, I’ve always wanted to take a bubble bath” after Carol starts a bubble bath for him.
As they consummate their relationship, the gas stove turns on by itself. This is followed by long panning shots of the house that last for roughly five minutes, eventually climaxing, horrifyingly, in windows sliding closed by themselves.
The film cuts to morning, where an appliance repairman examines the stove while Jonathan explains in voice-over, “If I hadn’t woken up, God knows what would have happened.”
After Jonathan leaves for his office, Carol does some gardening in her nice red dress, not noticing that the gardening shears are able to creep across the grass on their own.
Ghostly occurrences continue to occur—all the time. Carol doesn’t notice, but the candlesticks, random slips of paper, a tea kettle, and the phone move around all by themselves.
Meanwhile, Mr. Milligan introduces us to Carol’s bickering parents who live in the city so we can hear some of his trademarked insulting dialogue, such as the following exchange:
“What did you buy?”
“What do you care?”
“Well, did you get enough for lunch?”
“Of course I did.”
The ghostly effects become injurious quickly as a steak knife falls from somewhere onto Carol’s hand, causing blood to splatter onto the wall. Oddly, her dripping blood in the sink catches fire (almost imperceptibly).
Of course, Jonathan dismisses her concerns after he returns home. “It was only an accident. It didn’t cut too badly, did it?”
“No,” she says, agreeing with his dismissal. They discuss their plan to hire a housekeeper; Carol says she will interview a woman named Rose tomorrow. Then, in a romantic moment, he puts his head in her lap, tells her he loves her, and they both undress and immediately climb under their thick red blanket. “Good night,” he tells her, disappointing her.
The camera moves extremely slowly away from their bed, taking at least one minute to frame the flowers on the bedside table. Then it cuts away and we see something floating in the air. Loudly, the phonograph downstairs begins playing, forcing both Carol and Jonathan to run downstairs and turn it off.
In the basement, something horrifying happens, though it is too dark to make out specifics. Boxes, in particular, appear to fly through the air while a light fixture swings back and forth.
The next day, the film cuts to a new character, Ann, who has spent the night at her mother’s house because she is fighting with her husband Walter. Ann is Carol’s friend, and she and Walter are invited to Carol’s housewarming, though Ann isn’t excited about going. Her mother insists, “You’ll go, and you’ll go with a smile on your face.”
This simple conversation leads into a tour de force of Andy Milligan’s famously catty, vicious dialogue. Her mother tells her she needs to eat. “You’re eating for two, you know. God, I sound just like a mother.”
“A better mother I couldn’t have. Who else would let me knock on their door at 2:00 a.m.?”
Her mother complains, “God, I’m too young to be a mother, now I’m going to be a grandmother. Whatever will I tell my boyfriend?”
“You mean Carlos?” She clarifies that her mother picked up a “Latin waiter” at a place called the Oak Room.
Her mother further clarifies: “I didn’t pick him up, he picked me up. And he wasn’t a waiter, he was a maitre d’.” She adds, for unexplained reasons, “I don’t go to the Oak Room anymore.”
“They throw you out for soliciting?” her daughter asks cruelly.
“You know, you have a very vicious sense of humor.”
“It’s inherited.”
After these insults, they have a more serious heart-to-heart about marriage. Ann says she is going through a rough patch with her husband, and her mother says three years of marriage is a rough time. “After that,” she adds, “it gets worse and worse.” (Soon, during this extended and vicious conversation, their mother is revealed to be a psychiatrist who charges 85 dollars an hour to her patients.)
Meanwhile, Carol is interviewing a new housekeeper, Rose Novak. The first thing she does, of course, is give Mrs. Novak a tour of the basement. As housekeeper, it is Mrs. Novak’s job to help Carol unpack the boxes in the basement. Unfortunately, after Carol goes upstairs, Mrs. Novak chooses to unpack a box underneath a shelf from which hang a series of tools including a hammer and a hatchet, each of which starts to wobble supernaturally, unnoticed by Mrs. Novak at first, until things start flying at her and she suddenly sees a ghost bride appear in the basement.
The ghost yells, “Go! Get out of my house!” She starts strangling Mrs. Novak, but Carol intervenes and finds the woman slumped over against a wall.
Somewhat confusingly, the film cuts to an establishing shot of a high-rise apartment building, but the next shot returns to Carol and Jonathan’s house, where Mrs. Novak lies in a bed, apparently in a coma. A doctor says they will continue to observe her. As soon as they leave the bedroom, however, Mrs. Novak begins to sleepwalk, urged on by the ghost bride to walk into a bathroom, remove a straight razor from the medicine cabinet, and slice her own throat.
Later, Carol has breakfast (grapefruits and wine) with her father, who dismisses any supernatural implications regarding Mrs. Novak’s death. “It’s only a series of freak circumstances,” he comforts her. However, his housekeeper Martha thinks there’s a devil in Carol’s house.
In classic haunted house story fashion, Carol tells him she wants to find out about the history of the house.
The next supernatural occurrence (or “circumstance”) befalls a bearded man who walks around the outside of the haunted house, apparently casing it for burglary. He is unaware that he is being observed by a garden gnome that rotates to watch him. He whistles to his partner, signaling the house is clear to be burgled, and the two of them open a basement window and climb inside, not noticing the frightening tennis racket on the wall that jiggles as they enter.
After several minutes of skulking around the basement, the ghost bride appears again. She makes a hatchet cut off one of the burglar’s hands and then she impales the other one on a metal rod.
Grotesquely, the impaled man’s quite stringy intestines fall out of his stomach and writhe in front of him.
The film moves into its third act as Carol and Jonathan host their housewarming party. Ann and Walter arrive, as do another couple named Tony and Margaret. Someone named Tommy also appears. As tradition dictates, the housewarming is an overnight affair, and everyone gets ready for bed. More circumstances occur: Ann sees the ghost bride in the mirror while Walter takes a bath (which he calls a shower) that turns scalding hot.
After everyone gets dressed for the party proper, Margaret trips when the ghost moves a rug. She falls on broken glass and screams as the other partygoers pull the shards from her skin, resulting in blood squirting from her arms. She and Tony leave the overnight party to go to the nearest hospital.
Later, Ann and Walter get ready for bed. Of course, Walter attempts to take his second bath of the day, even though he earlier had trouble with the hot water.
Ann packs her suitcase (she appears to have packed at least six sets of clothes for the overnight party). Nobody is aware that the radio in the bathroom is moving by itself—it suddenly falls into the tub, exploding and electrocuting poor Walter.
The film smash-cuts to the cemetery where Walter is being buried.
The next day, Carol goes to City Hall to research the house. She meets with a man named Willis Karp, who knew the previous owners of the house, Mark and Susan. He tells her Mark and Susan loved each other dearly, but they lost their baby and became obsessed with restoring the house to its original condition. “I used to be a houseguest on weekends, and you could feel that house come alive with their love and their adoration.” Unfortunately, Susan discovered she had breast cancer. On the anniversary of the day they took possession of their house, Mark and Susan shot themselves.
Directory Andy Milligan intercuts Carol’s research with Jonathan’s secretary visiting the house to drop something off—and being decapitated suddenly by an axe that floats through the air by itself.
A few days later, Carol invites a priest to investigate the house. When he arrives, she tells him all the circumstances that have been occurring, with the support of Jonathan, who now believes the house is haunted. They tour the house quickly. “Well, in looking it over, I’d say the house seems normal,” the priest concludes. However, when Carol tells him she believes the house is haunted by the ghost of Susan, he adds, “As I see it, the soul of Susan is controlling the…let’s say the soul of the house. They’ve become one. I don’t see any way of resolving the problem, except…sell the house?”
Suddenly, they hear screams. Carol and Jonathan try to get the priest out of the house, but all the doors lock by themselves. The ghosts of Susan and Mark appear, as does a mysterious fog in the living room. The ghosts use the pulling-the-rug trick again, tripping the priest. In one of the film’s most frightening sequences, Carol and Jonathan have trouble getting him back on his feet. They get out of the house, but as they step outside, the priest is killed by a meat cleaver that flies through the air into the back of his head.
Finally, Carol and Jonathan decide to move away. As Jonathan goes outside to “get the car ready,” Susan’s ghost appears to Carol. “I’m sorry,” Carol says, for unknown reasons.
“Don’t go,” the ghost pleads.
“We can’t stay. Not now.”
“Don’t go,” the ghost repeats. “We will leave you alone. If you keep the house just as it is.”
When Jonathan returns to the foyer, he sees that Carol has apparently joined Mark and Susan as a ghost, and the trio advances on him creepily.
“Oh my God,” Jonathan says.
In the film’s coda cementing Andy Milligan’s reputation as a master of supernatural ambiguity, Carol and Jonathan dress in wedding attire as they have a ghostly wedding attended only by Mark and Susan. Jonathan picks up a handgun and points it at his wife’s head, repeating the ghostly cycle. The final shot is an awkwardly placed For Sale sign on the lawn.
The End
Carnage is one of Andy Milligan's finest and most atypical works, as it is set in the modern world and has only one scene where people insult and degrade one another. Compared to some of Mr. Milligan's classics, it appears to have a lower budget, if such a thing is possible. Despite this limitation, Mr. Milligan creates spooky shots of axes jiggling, boxes moving, a garden gnome turning its head, and various tchotchkes flying through the air, not to mention gore scenes with creative disembowelings and decapitations. It is a relief to see that even in the mid 1980s Mr. Milligan's ambitions were not hamstrung by budgetary resources. Mr. Milligan also extracts some of the best performances of his filmography from the actors, who are completely committed to the reality of the supernatural goings-on. In summary, Carnage is a fine example of an Andy Milligan and a fine example of a horror film, which might make it--even with all its illustrious competition--Mr. Milligan's masterpiece.