“Why can’t people be nice to one another?” This wishful world view spoken by a naïve teenage girl is a key line in a late-career work by a filmmaker whose low-budget grindhouse output was rife with torture and cruelty. It’s a cry of innocence corrupted, and a sign that despite a life and work steeped in decadence, Andy Milligan was as much a corrupted innocent as that teenage girl. And his 1989 film The Weirdo, one of the last he made before succumbing to AIDS in 1991, is one of his final lamentations.
Steve Burington stars as Donnie, who’s…off. We meet him scrounging for debris in a gully, his secret place to get away from the world; unfortunately, this idyll is broken, as Donnie’s life is repeatedly broken throughout the film, by a gang of local bullies who beat the crap out of this outsider. But soon Donnie meets the even more naïve Jenny (Jessica Straus), who seems to be the first person to ever show him any kindness.
Until the film takes a distinctive Milliganesque turn in the final act, The Weirdo plays largely like a low-budget “ABC Afterschool Special” made by someone who swerves between family entertainment and Z-movie luridness. One moment Donnie is ogling a young woman as she takes a bubble bath; the next he’s meeting Jenny by the river, like this is an episode of “Little House on the Prairie.” These conflicting impulses come from the same moral place: in most of his movies, somebody takes a bath, however incongruously, and while the display of flesh is played for voyeurism (linking Donnie to notable fictional contemporary), a Milligan bath often seems like an act of purification. An act that leaves these subjects vulnerable, and in other Milligan films, is often a prelude to death.
Much as Cry Macho gives Clint Eastwood a chance to pass on some wisdom before he passes on, Mulligan peppers The Weirdo with dialogue that nakedly reveals his vulnerable underbelly.
Donnie: I have nothing else to give you.
Jenny: Just being with someone is giving.
Donnie and Jenny don’t seem like real people, but Burington and Straus are strangely moving in their inexperience—and this is most likely a by-product of Milligan’s time in theater, which made him push his seasoned actors to raw and sometimes over-the-top performances. While that would lead to fantastic vitriol from such Milligan regulars as Maggie Rogers, his young charges here are asked to do more with less. The Weirdo is full of such primitive, unlikely dialogue as:
Donnie: You want some water? It’s good.
Jenny: Thank you [drinks] it’s very good.
On paper, and to be honest, on film, this exchange seems ludicrous; but there’s something so pure here, Milligan asking these doe-eyed performers to make something out of nothing, and it’s beautiful, part of a consistent tone that sets up the young lovers as people completely outside the normal world. Sure, they’re both weirdos, as was Milligan; but they’re the good guys—that is, until Donnie, after years of abuse, finally snaps, going on a murderous spree and is eventually set upon by vengeful townspeople, while Jenny looks on in horror.
That scene leads to Jenny’s bitter cry mourning for the state of the world. It’s hilarious and campy, but it’s also undeniably sincere. The Weirdo is a perfect starter Milligan, delivering all his themes and fixations without the stark rawness and brutality of, say Seeds. His gory, desperate vision, which he was driven to create again and again, had a tender message at its heart—a message that left him, like Donnie and Jenny, forever out of step with the world.
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