by: Mike Hunchback

You should know of course that our band’s name, “Night Birds”, is in fact the title of a formerly lost Milligan picture.  And NIGHT BIRDS, like many of Milligan’s films, was so sickly submerged in infirmity that it totally undermined its own potential for even remote success.  See, back then if a guy could whip together a flick with a few pairs of boobs shaking around in under a week he could pretty easily get steady work as a “movie director”.  The big-wigs of plenty of film distribution companies wanted nothing more than thinly-plotted celluloid skin parades with lotsa sinnin’ and little thinkin’, dig?  Now, Milligan could deliver in double-time, and at half the price too.  So a unique situation was born: the producers paid very little therefore cared even less, and Milligan pretty much had free reign to do whatever the fuck he wanted.  The result?  Films like the film that is our entry today … SEEDS OF SIN!

The “plot” is based around the Manning family reunion, and it’s been years since some of them have seen each other.  However this family, like all families really, absolutely does NOT want to be around each other – and for good reason!  But their matriarch has demanded it, and since she’s likely to croak soon, the kids all want to make sure their names are high on that tasty will of hers.  Decades of dirty laundry quickly piles up right out in the open and almost everybody is schtuppin’ someone they ain’t supposed to.  Before long, people are getting saw blades to the cranium, acid baths, poisoned, allsorts of good stuff!  If you could follow this thing at all you’d probably be wondering who the heck was doing all of this killing.  Now, the market for these films was basically that of theatrical ‘soft’ pornography (at the time there was no legal way to show actual sex on film in a movie theater), the flesh exposed was what brought the largely male audience in.  And that’s why Milligan sticks out like a sore thumb in the world of skin flicks – NO ONE could jerk off to these movies!  The normal feature of this type was light, and would perhaps involve a rudimentary plot about a girl that gets into nude modeling; or a bunch of free-lovin’ hippie girls that live together and pick up some wacky fella hitchhiking.  But ol’ Andy wanted to make a different kind of picture … SEEDS OF SIN’s major plot points you ask?  Incest.  Matricide.  Suicide.  Homosexuality.  Degradation.  Masochism.  Murder.  And oh yeah, is there a word for when a sexually-deviant priest wants gals to hock loogies into his mouth?  This is a REAL Horror film, folks!

Although the cut offered by Something Weird Video (as of now the only one available) isn’t Milligan’s original version of the film, it still packs a fat, heaping fistful of delightful wrongness, and is perhaps made a more accurate time capsule because of the tinkering: in between scenes of Milligan’s film the distributor inserted boring, flesh-flashing scenes of hairy hippie kids rolling around; soft n’ nude.  Don’t worry though, you’ll still see an old lady roll down the stairs in her wheelchair.  

With SEEDS OF SIN Milligan was out to satiate his own possessing desires and fears, and I don’t think he really thought about the audience very much at all.  I think if he did, he probably would’ve cracked a twisted smile and laughed to himself about how much he might be upsetting someone.  After all, it was clear how Milligan felt when he made these wonderful, offensive cinematic curios: if they can’t take it – fuck ’em!