Three sisters travel to their late father's mansion where they are to spend three nights together with their respective husbands, before they are eligible to hear the will (read to them by a man wearing make-up to rival Ramses' from Blood Feast (1963)). Also there are the two housekeepers, Martha (Veronica Radburn) and Ruth (Maggie Rogers), and Martha's deformed and dim-witted son Colin (Hal Borske), who we see murder two people at the beginning of the film. After a night of pompous partying, one of the couples, Veronica (Eileen Hayes) and Bill (Don Williams), find a dead rabbit in their bed (which was previously seen being eaten alive by Colin) with a note attached reading 'blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit."Directed by exploitation and horror hack Andy Milligan, The Ghastly Ones (titled Blood Rites in the UK and placed on the Video Nasty list) is a fine example as to why he is considered one of the worst directors of all time, commonly placed in the same category of Edward D. Wood, Jr. and Herschell Gordon Lewis. He began his career in small-time off- Broadway production during the 1950's, and his experience in that medium is evident here as, unlike most trashy horror films, the film is almost unbearably wordy, as the main characters have their mundane conversations between the brief moments of gore. Saying that, I would much rather be listening to conversation than watching overlong stalking scenes or disco dancing which was so prevalent as running-time-filler in Grindhouse movies.However, the movie is a massive bore, and even with the slender running- time of 70 minutes, I checked how long there was remaining at least three or four times. The awful, clunky camera-work, added to the fact that the film stock was so poor I could barely make out faces, gave me a headache. When the moments of inevitable gore come, the film is given a little relief, as the scenes of pitch-fork impaling and disembowelment are so bad it does give the film a little charm. It would work quite nice as a double-bill with the aforementioned Blood Feast, as they are both short, amateurish, and most notably, s**t.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Staten Island filmmaker Andy Milligan is well known in the horror community for being an even worse director than Ed Wood. And with this as a dim example of his output I'm apt to agree with them. In "The Ghastly Ones" we basically have three bickering couples traveling to their childhood home (located on a conveniently secluded island) to collect an inheritance. There they are killed off one by one and the events unfold in murder/mystery fashion with a scarred retard hunchback butler added to throw you for a loop. The film is in such bad shape that it looks like someone just ran it through a dishwasher, the sound is terrible, the dialog is otherworldly bad, there's some primitive mannequin gore (plus some dismemberments and guts) and it's technically inept in every possible way it can be inept. But is it enjoyable in a bad movie kind of way? Sort of. It's excruciating to watch but oddly entertaining in a train wreck fashion. Approach with caution. If you're not a fan of horrible movies better deep six this one.

THE GHASTLY ONES is a brainboiler of a cheap horror film. The plot involves three sisters and their husbands travelling to their isolated childhood home to hear the reading of their late father's will, but someone is willing to kill to keep the money all to themselves. Director/producer Andy Milligan attempts a 1905 setting for his film despite something like $20.00 for a budget, although its highly unlikely that women from that era wore see-through black negligees to bed. Along with the wobbly period details, there's stabbings,decapitation, mutilations with hacksaws, and live rabbit eating. Ole! Ten years later, Milligan remade this flick as the somewhat more competent(and narratively coherent)LEGACY OF HORROR. If you're looking for a laughable, confused mess, go with THE GHASTLY ONES. If you want a more understandable film that offers characters whose motives are revealed during the course of the story, go with LEGACY OF HORROR. Calm me old fashioned, but I prefer the latter, because the reasons revealed for some of the characters' behavior makes the resulting carnage all the more chilling. And the simpleton brother is show as an abused, sad waste of human potential, not a ghoulish geek. The scene where he sits in his dank basement room, battering a teddy bear while grunting the word "stupid" over and over is more chilling than a dozen disembowelings--something that I think Milligan was not conscious of. Okay, so maybe I overanalyze, but I like to see the psychological underside of these characters. After all, a psycho doesn't make himself crazy, does he?

Andy Milligan was a film maker out of Staten Island New York who made films of very low quality but managed to be entertainig anyway. Ghastly Ones has a great premise about three sisters who go to a private island for the reading of their father's will. Soon the sisters and their husbands begin getting brutally murdered! IS the killer the weird mute hunchback brother of the housekeeper?? Or is it someone else??? The script is actually a lot of fun and so are the murders. The camera work and photography damage the film from living up to it's potential. The acting and story are above average and I liked the ending a lot. The opening murder has nothing to do with the rest of the film either. Still Ghastly Ones is worth a look!!