I know you're all wondering what I thought of Andy Milligan's 1985 haunted house thriller CARNAGE, so I shall oblige ...

Amoral anti-genius Andy Milligan turns in his most disciplined, conventional horror film with Carnage. Gone are the hard-bitten street hustlers he usually cast, replaced with clean-cut drama students who were mistaken if they thought this was their big break. Maybe Milligan had the same misconception, since he's more careful with pacing and plotting than before, but this is the same director who brought us shrieking gorefests like Bloodthirsty Butchers and Torture Dungeon, so there's no shortage of transparently fake decapitations and disembowelments for the faithful. Milligan gleefully rips off The Amityville Horror and Poltergeist, but hallmarks of his own cinematic obsessions arise as well, most notably in a throwaway scene involving one character’s cold, insensitive mother. While Carnage is too hokey to be frightening, Milligan packs in one outrageous shock sequence after another and holds the audience’s attention better than his often tedious (but more personal) earlier films. Carnage is truly godawful, but enjoyable in a way that the rest of his shrill, misanthropic oeuvre is not.

There's two more reviews I need to grind out for AMG before Thursday (I'm allowed three submissions per week and Thursday is the deadline if I want to post my full quota), but the problem is that the next one on the list is CRIMSON, a truly breathtaking piece of Spanish crime/gore garbage that I'm in love with and want to do right by. But I'm running out of ways to express how mindbending these broken, surreal films can be. I think I need to start consulting dream interpretation books ... the best of these bad films are like nightmares where nothing makes sense, the storyline non-linear, the characters behaving strangely, violence surfacing suddenly and without provocation. There's no other way to describe them or the pleasure they provide. These films fail entirely when judged by conventional cinematic criteria, so things like bad acting, confusing scripts and half-assed direction don't matter. So what's left? Other than sheer outrage and spectacle?