The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (1972): or Hell is Other People. And Werewolves.

In the 3+ years since starting this blog, The Duke and I have discovered many Mad Movie Makers whose enthusiasm for their genres is a constant inspiration to us. These are directors and writers whose films betray an irrepressible, infectious joy for the process, no matter how limited the budget or poorly executed the ideas. Of course our patron saint Paul Naschy is the archetypal example, his love of monsters and excitement at being able to realize his dreams on screen bleeding into every frame. Mad Genius Jess Franco is another whose enthusiasm cannot be questioned, and even the Brazilian Demon Lord Jose Mojica Marins's nightmare visions are often tinged with a mischievous sense of humor and twisted joy that we find extremely affecting. The list goes on, from filmmakers with dozens of directorial credits to one-off dream-makers who made their shot at Mad Movie immortality count.

And then there's Andy Milligan. Just as compulsively devoted to making movies, just as inspired by tales of monsters and mayhem, just as determined to overcome shortcomings of money or talent as any of the above-mentioned luminaries, Milligan's oeuvre is something else entirely. For Naschy and Franco and others, nearly every film, no matter how "bad," seems a genuine expression of a deep kind of love. For Milligan, every movie seems a scream of pain and rage, an open, suppurating psychological wound. With the Joymongers above, you want to sit down and talk movies with them over a glass of fine port. With Milligan, you just want him to get help. NOW.

Perhaps Milligan's most eye-catchingly titled film, The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (1972) is no exception. Though lighter on the papier mache gore effects and overt sadism of Guru the Mad Monk (1970) or the monster-on-monster action of Blood (1974)--reviewed here and here on MMMMMovies respectively--TRaC!TWaH! is still packed to the gills with all the venom and hysterical hate of both those movies, and then some. Is that a recommendation? Maybe.

It's Hobo-Stomping Day!

We start things off with a bang: after a few establishing shots of a nicely gothic-looking mansion, Milligan sweeps his camera dizzyingly over a formal garden that at first seems to be ON FIRE, until you realize it's just an overactive fog machine hidden behind one of the hedges. We discover two young toughs roughing up a grunting, shrieking tatterdemalion, raining blows over his head and shoulders that he's powerless to stop. As one of the ruffians holds the hapless hobo down, the other pours lamp-oil on his back and sets him ablaze! At this point the residents of the mansion pour out to the victim's rescue, and his attackers scatter as the heroes put out the flames.

Turns out the victim is Malcolm Mooney (Berwick Kaler), the mentally handicapped youngest son of the aristocratic Mooney clan. His rescuers are brother Mortimer (Noel Collins), eldest sister Phoebe (Joan Ogden), and youngest sister Monica (Blood's Hope Stansbury).Far from being concerned about their brother's burns, however, the Mooney siblings immediately start hurling hateful recriminations at each other for having let Malcolm get out of his cell. Monica even spanks her wounded brother as Mortimer hauls him inside, which doesn't seem very sisterly to me.

"I'll show you all! I WILL win the World Bitch Championships this year!"

It doesn't take long for the audience to realize that the Mooneys are as dysfunctional as grass is green. When Phoebe wonders aloud why Monica hates Malcolm so much, Mortimer spits back, "Monica hates everything and everybody! She's just ONE BIG HATE." When Phoebe tattles to bedridden Pa Mooney (Douglas Phair) about her sister's behavior, she gets another dose of venom. "I'm tired of Monica getting blamed for everything. She's my baby, and she'll always be my baby! If you don't like it, then GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!" Pa has a frail ticker, though, and drops into a seizure, whereupon Phoebe injects him with something--a fresh supply of bile is my guess--to keep him going a few more days.

To his credit (?), Milligan packs an awful lot of familial dysfunction into the first five minutes of his flick. All the characters seem absolutely frantic to get out as much hatred and venom as humanly possible in the limited amount of time they're allowed. It's like an episode of the Jerry Springer show that plays 24/7 in the Mooney household. Sartre famously said, "Hell is Other People," and I have to believe that Milligan agrees 100%--though he might add "--and yourself" to that formulation.

The Disembodied Head of the Amazing Madame Mombo is overcome with passion at the sight of  Manly Mortimer's nipples.

Things don't get any better when youngest daughter Diana (Jackie Skarvellis) comes home,  having been away in Scotland at medical school for the past four years. With her she brings hapless new hubby Gerald (Ian Innes), who can have no earthly idea what he's let himself in for in marrying a Mooney. Pa is dead-set against the marriage, hinting cryptically that they "can't take the chance" until he finishes his "experiments"--experiments Diana was educated in order to assist him with. Monica makes it her business to let her new brother-in-law know the score right away, however. "Hello, I'm Monica, the middle sister. The BITCH! The one they always talk about behind her back!" Well, it's not bragging if it's true. Gerald's first dinner with the family further establishes the unwise nature of his choice of bride, as it ends in fisticuffs and Monica shouting, "You go to HELL! ALL OF YOU!" No surprise that Gerald wants to get (the fuck) out of there after one night, and this before he learns the Mooney's real dark secret.

So the way it shakes out is this: the Mooney's are a family of werewolves, which might be a spoiler if it wasn't, you know, in the TITLE of the movie. Their affliction is passed on through the blood, which is why Pa doesn't want any of the kids to marry. Malcolm is the most bestial of the clan--for reasons that become off-puttingly clear later--and Diana is the most nearly normal, since her mother, Pa's second wife, was "untainted" by the curse. However, the second Mrs. Mooney was mysteriously poisoned shortly after Diana's birth, a fact that concerns Pa less than you would think.

"Mousey, this is going to hurt me more than it does you...haha, just kidding. This is gonna SUCK for you."

Milligan gets quite a bit of mileage out of questions of familial taint (ooer). Diana explains Malcolm's malady with a shrug: "The genes get mixed up at conception and he never developed into a normal baby!" As it happens Gerald also has a strange family history--his father was executed for raping a six-year-old girl, and Gerald himself was raised by nuns who habitually stripped him naked and whipped him in front of all the other orphans. Though Milligan's ADD-directorial style never allows this to gel into a really cohesive subtext, the pervasiveness of the characters' scarred pasts and their effects on the present are definitely an interesting aspect to the story.

Presumably due to his bestial retardation, Malcolm is locked in a cell-cum-chicken-coop, surrounded by nervous birds that are occasionally thrown across the frame by off-camera crewmen. To control his other children's monthly episodes, Pa sedates them and himself on nights of the full moon, though this doesn't stop the kids from congregating in the courtyard and tearing more chickens apart to sate their unnatural bloodlust. This is actually a rather eerie scene, perhaps because it's the first time in the movie the family gets together without screaming invectives at one another, instead silently cooperating on their little blood ritual. The fact that "voice" of the doomed chicken in its death throes is clearly done by a human impresario--perhaps Milligan himself?--is both hilarious and strangely disquieting.

Pumpkin Orange Gown + Tan-in-a-Can == FABULOUS!

I mentioned that Milligan seems to have a certain attention-deficient quality as a director, and this carries through into the script, which he also wrote. The movie is peppered with odd, seemingly non sequitur episodes, such as Monica's repeated torturing of mice and other small animals (apparently done for real, sadly). Later she goes into town to buy more "pets" from a disfigured, Orc-like shopkeeper, who sells her a bunch of vicious rats that he's raised on human flesh! (This was a bad idea for many reasons, not least because, as he tells his customer, one night as he was passed out drunk the rats escaped their cage and ate HIS ENTIRE ARM and half his face before he awoke!) These are the rats of the title, one assumes, and I was thinking they'd be important later...but strangely, after one of them bites her Monica returns them to the shop, and upon failing to get her money back sics the man-eating rats on the shopkeeper, who sets himself and the shop on fire in his panic. And that's pretty much the end of the rat episode.

We get more of Monica's psychopathy later, when an urchin friend of hers (who appears out of NOWHERE) tries to blackmail her with knowledge of the Mooney curse, and ends up getting hacked to death in a gazebo. This is the only real gore scene of the flick (minus the mouse execution), with Monica cleaving mannequin-hands off stuffed sleeves while Milligan indulges his patented "swirling camera" chaos technique. Not as juicy as the scenes in Guru the Mad Monk, but at least it's something.

Handy Chopper

After Gerald accidentally touches his mom's silver cross to Monica's back (after she leaps out of his armoire brandishing a knife!), the resultant puff of smoke and screaming exit clues him in to what's really afoot. Pa Mooney tells him the whole story, though strangely his "experiments" seem to have nothing to do with fixing the whole werewolf thing, but rather with prolonging human life towards immortality. (?) Fed up with her sibling's hysteria, Diana has the cross melted down into bullets and buys a gun for them (in another strange extended scene with a lonely silversmith, played by Andy Milligan himself in a fright wig and Fuller Brush-moustache), and gets ready for the Big Climactic Showdown.

Things have been dragging a little in the latter half of the movie, but the final confrontation with the Mooneys brings it back around, as each family member seems compelled to confess some past sin before wolfing out and attacking. (Spoiler: Phoebe's has something to do with the death of Diana's mom and the reason for Malcolm's condition.) Milligan's swirling camera is in full effect again, and it's hard to see whether the werewolf makeup is any good, but I'm guessing not. With her family exterminated, Diana has one more surprise in store for Gerald, who must end up thinking those days being whipped naked by sadistic nuns look pretty good in retrospect.

Blink and you'll miss him

I mention Milligan in the same breath as people like Naschy and Marins and Franco, but let's be clear about one thing--as a filmmaker, Andy hasn't a smidgen of the talent of any of those guys. His movies are bad--badly written, badly edited (Andy did the splicing himself as well, with the same ADD quality as his writing and directing), badly photographed, and mostly badly acted. (I would single out Hope Stansbury's performance as a rare exception--her bitchy psychopathic portrayal of Monica is a bright spot here, and I always enjoyed watching her spew venom at her hapless costars.) So with all these caveats, why does Andy Milligan fascinate me so?

Maybe it's because his films feel like expressions of a diseased mind, cries from a wounded, desperate soul. Not for help, perhaps--in Milligan's movies human beings seem genuinely beyond all help--but for expression, to be heard over the howling din of the madding crowd. Milligan seemed to have an OCD for filmmaking--he made over 25 movies, all of them on shoestring or nonexistent budgets, and most of which he wrote, edited, photograped, and even made the costumes for (he was an accomplished gown-maker) himself! In the realm of Mad Movie directors, Milligan is far from the most accomplished, but he definitely makes a run for the top spot of MOST MAD.

The Duke dictates his autobiography to a nude dwarf amanuensis with a 12-inch schwanschtucker.

Not many casual viewers are going to like The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! If you're looking for a werewolf extravaganza, this isn't it--there's really only one scene of werewolf action, and that comes eighty minutes into this 90-minute flick. Lycanthrope fans might find something interesting in the idea of the werewolf family's interaction, and how they're cursed not only by their werwolfism, but by their dependence on one another--but it's a bit of a stretch.

Still, I found this movie fascinating--maybe in the way highway accidents and public arguments between enraged relatives are fascinating. Somehow all that bile and venom and hate got under my skin and made it hard for me to look away. And I think there's something to be said for a movie that can get to you like that, however badly made it is on a technical level. So would I recommend TRaC!TWaH! to the unintiated? Probably not. But rating it on my own reaction, I'm giving it 2 thumbs. If you're looking for something different and possibly unique, give Milligan's movies a shot. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Andy Hates Us All

Nota Bene: Whether you're a Milligan movie fan or not, I can HIGHLY recommend Jimmy McDonough's excellent biography of the man, The Ghastly One: the Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan. A fascinating portrait of an extremely damaged man, with lots of great stories about the movies and the people behind them, not to mention Andy's connection to Warhol, Cafe Cino and the beginnings of Off-Broadway theater. Even if you never plan to see an Andy Milligan film, it's a GREAT read.

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Guru, the Mad Monk (1970): or, Sunday School's for Suckers

It's a MAD MAD Mad Mad Movie Week--Day Two, Review #98

At the Lost Souls Church of Mortavia, times is hard. Mother Church has apparently forgotten her little outpost on the seldom-visited island, leaving head clergyman Guru to scrounge for cash however he can in order to keep fighting the good fight and doing the Lord's work. He is able to bring in a little extra money by using the church dungeons to imprison ne'er-do-wells and degenerates shipped over from the mainland, and gets a bonus for attending to the well-being of their souls whilst also personally attending to their corporeal punishments. But those candles ain't cheap, nor is the upkeep of Guru's mistress/amateur apothecary Olga (who has Special Dietary Needs). With his adopted one-eyed hunchback ward Igor in tow, Guru must find a new way to make ends meet.

Luckily inspiration strikes when the lovely young Nadja is dragged kicking and screaming into the dungeon by two black-hooded executioners who seem to moonlight as Mortavia's beat-walking police force. Accused of murdering her newborn child and trying to dispose of the body, she is sentenced to die at Guru's hands. As Fate would have it, Nadja's old lover Carl has taken a day job as jailer in the church dungeon. Nadja professes her innocence, claiming to have been kidnapped by a gypsy king and forced to bear his child, only to escape just before her water broke. The baby was stillborn, she says, and she was just trying to give the tyke a decent burial when she was apprehended. Though an ordinary person might well invite Nadja to "pull the other, the one with bells on," Carl trusts her implicitly and rushes off to talk to Guru about her plight.

Guru listens to Carl's pleas pleasantly, but informs him that the girl has been condemned by the church and cannot be saved. Therefore he should just trust in God. When Carl opines "I can't believe there is a God, when things like this occur!" he is repaid for his blasphemy by a vicious pope-slap! Still, Guru concocts a possible escape--he'll get Olga to mix up the old Capulet Headache Home Remedy that will cause Nadja to appear dead so that Carl may resuscitate her at his leisure. The price? Carl must agree to transport the bodies of executed criminals to the university in a town many leagues distant in order to sell them to medical students and fill the church's coffers with gold! The Cash-for-Corpses scheme doesn't sit too well with Carl, but seeing little choice, he agrees.

Carl becomes Jesus's bitch.

But Olga has a price of her own before she'll part with the powder. Dressed in resplendent 70s thrift-store fabric and a truly ostentatious headdress, the conniving chemist makes Carl promise to leave the bodies of executed criminals lying on the chopping block for half an hour before packing them up for delivery, so that she can extract their blood for some "experiments" she's conducting. Stuck again, Carl acquiesces, proving the truth of the old maxim "Once you say yes to springing your gypsy-befouled baby-killing girlfriend from prison, you can't very well say no to anything else."

Next we get to see the holy money machine in action, as Guru blesses and then executes a procession of the condemned from the church's dungeon. A "peeper" has his eyes put out, a thief has her hands hacked off, and of course Nadja is set up to be terminally truncated for the grand finale. But true to his word Guru slips her the potion in the last rites wine, and she collapses before the axe can fall. Guru and Carl tote Nadja away, while Olga crawls toward the blood-soaked butcher block on all fours, snarling! You know, for SCIENCE.

Carl is of course delighted to have Nadja free and clear, but unfortunately he hasn't figured on Guru's duplicity. Dropping all pretense of compassion and kindness, the old monk lords his power over the lad like a spider taunting a fly who has fallen into his web. "I preach one thing and continue believing another!" Guru declares evilly, and drives Carl away on his body-shopping errand. Meanwhile Nadja must stay in the bell tower for leverage, where she is taken care of by the child-simple hunchback Igor.

"But Olga, I'm not sure I can fill that whole thing in one go!"

At this point Guru goes completely off the rails. In a powerhouse scene that would not be equaled until Willem Defoe recreated it in Spider-Man, Neil Flanagan as Guru argues with himself in a full-length mirror, alternating between the kind man of God and the evil, self-serving sadist with dizzying speed. While Guru murders a few vagrants freelance when they come to the church seeking help (including one near-orgasmic stabbing of a sailor--ooer), Nadja befriends Igor and gains the deformed lad's affection. And if that weren't enough, a buxom babe comes into the sanctuary only to be hypnotized and drained by Olga, who reveals herself as "The Soul of Darkness"--a vampire queen! Whoa, Nelly!

It all comes to a head when Mother Church alerts Guru to her intention to replace him with a new, less-maniacal monk. Guru overreacts to the news just a tiny bit, slaughtering the two mainland clergymen before dumping Olga and proposing to run off with Nadja, who has made his little bishop genuflect IYKWIMAITYD. We get a revealed severed head, an appallingly unconvincing self-stab, and poor Igor nailed to a door like the 95 theses before a henchman rebellion brings an end to the whole sad, sordid tale.

This is my second trip into the wild world of eccentric lunatic filmmaker Andy Milligan, and it certainly hasn't dampened the flames of my interest. Shot four years before Blood and purportedly the only Milligan feature done in 35mm rather than 16 or less with blow-ups, it certainly LOOKS a lot better than both that feature and The Ghastly Ones--which is perhaps the definition of damning with faint praise, but still.

Mom told you so.

The acting again is fairly good if graded on a curve against what one typically sees in productions of this sort. Neil Flanagan as Guru is the best of the mediocre lot, which is good since the success of the flick rests on his shoulders. He plays the smarmy conniving holy man with convincing evil glee, and his one-man duel against his mirror image is actually very well acted. Jack Spencer as Igor contributes a technically dubious but at times strangely affecting performance, particularly in his manic, lovelorn exchanges with Nadja. Judith Israel as Nadja does all right, while Jacqueline Webb stinks up the joint as Olga and Paul Lieber as Carl invests every line with an "aw shucks" naivety, his soothing quiet voice appealing though unsuited to the role. (Lieber apparently went on to have a very busy career in television acting--his imdb credits continue to the present day, a rarity for a Milligan cast member.) Julia Willis makes an impression as Christine, largely on the strength of her pretty face (and prodigious boobages). The direction recalls a stagy 1940s melodrama, and overall the acting standard is on par with an upper-end high school play--which again in this instance is actually rather a compliment.

Speaking of direction, Andy Milligan displays a remarkable (for him) feeling of control over the production here, which in Milligan's case is perhaps not altogether a good thing. While it's easier to follow and less headache-inducing, it also lacks some of the manic, wild energy that Blood displayed, the feeling that the whole thing was a damaged helicopter spinning madly out of control until the inevitable crash. That said, the hate is still in evidence, if somewhat subdued, particularly in late exchanges between Guru and the Bishop who's come to relieve him of his post. The makeup and effects are very low-rent but more fun because of it--severed hands a la mannequin, pierced eyes made of marshmallows, and silly-putty hunchback disfigurements just being a few examples.

He's got the whole world on his head.

So in the end, Guru is both better and worse than the other Milligan films I've seen, but nonetheless interesting. Like Blood, this one clocks in at less than 1 hour, so the time-investment isn't daunting; even if you don't like it, you've only missed one episode of Law and Order: Super Rapist Destroying Division, so no harm, no foul. 2 thumbs for this little slice of Milligan madness.


Note: the version I got from Netflix included a 12-minute Milligan documentary, which was actually just an interview with a crew member who worked with Andy on his last couple of flicks. The fellow's insights on Milligan, whom he describes as like "a frantic bunny" on the set who didn't trust anyone else to do anything and thus did pretty much everything himself, are fascinating and I wanted to hear more. When asked whether Milligan in fact had any filmmaking talent, he demurs with the line, "The only talent Andy ever really had was the ability to get things done." For some reason, this didn't sound like a bad thing to me--to press forward and chase the dream, even when lacking funds, support, or basic aptitude? What's more of a Glorious Failure than that?

Living La Vida Vicar

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Blood (1974): or, The Dysfunctional House of Frankenstein

Picture an early Paul Naschy movie, something that might have been ancilliary to the Daninsky saga. Say the plot goes something like this: the son of the world's most famous werewolf returns to the relocated-to-America Talbot estate under an assumed name with his vampire bride, the Daughter of Dracula, in tow. Unable to take possession of his ancestral home immediately , the younger Talbot, something of an amateur scientist, spends his time in a rented house with his two servants (a legless butler named Orlando and his lame, limping, sexually frustrated wife) and his mentally challenged ward Carlotta, performing experiments.

What kind of experiments? Well, mainly they're raising a crop of enormous man-eating plants (!) in the cellar by feeding them Carlotta's blood, so that they can extract from the roots a serum which not only allows Mrs. Talbot to keep from vamping out, but also suppresses the werewolf's transformations every full moon. Then, of course, things start to go wrong...

As you can see, a perfectly serviceable, even smile-inducing kitchen-sink, monster-fantasy plot, worthy of a spot the early Naschy filmography.

Now, subtract all funding for things like effects and sets, remove any sense of competency in the cinematography and editing, and replace Naschy's boundless, child-like joy and enthusiasm with bottomless pits of boiling, seething, unending HATE.

Welcome to Andy Milligan's Blood.

"I hate you."

Working with almost zero budget, Milligan produces a one-hour opus that, while never able to cover up its grindhouse roots, is still difficult to dismiss as the work of a bumbling amateur. Sure, the editing looks to have been done by a chimp with epilepsy, jumping from a conversational scene to an action-filled monster-fight and back in a few feverish tics of a neurotic eye; sure, the cinematography is bottom-drawer throughout, especially in an extended nighttime scene where the viewer must deduce what's going on purely through use of the soundtrack; sure, the sets--meant to be late 1800s manors and inns--are obviously modern apartments and houses (watch especially for the "kitchen" scene)--there's no denying all these zero-budget shortcomings.

Still, though, there's something fascinating, something hypnotic about it all--something that settles in your brain and tells you there's something, SOMETHING there--which prevents you from switching off or looking away.

"God, how I hate you!"

Maybe it's the way Dr. Orlofski (nee Talbot) and his vampire bride snap at each other with a venom that could only come from years of living together in a hatred that sprung from withered love. (In bed the vampire woman, her amorous advances refused, spits at Oronofski "Go to hell!", to which he replies, wearily, "We're already there.") Or the mystery of the ailment that took servant Orlando's legs (forcing him to drag his body around on an cart that is always unseen by the audience--we just hear the squeaking wheels while the actor shuffles around on his knees), an ailment that also infects his sexually frustrated wife, and that perhaps has something to do with the plants.

Perhaps it's everyone's out-in-the-open, reasonless hatred for the grotesque, retarded Carlotta, whose brain damage is the fault of the doctor and his servants taking too much of her blood. Is it the strange borderline incestuous exchange between the female servant and her visiting virile brother? The seemingly kind-hearted lawyer's assistant who in the end proves herself as capable of venom-spitting as any of the other snakes? The incongruous hilarity of the country-fried nosy neighbor? The blink-and-you'll-miss-it transformation of Orlofski to bargain-mask werewolf? The bad accent and strange physical mannerisms of Old Lord Talbot's gypsy lover? The incessant creaking of the man-eating plants?

"I, too, am brimming with hate for you."

Individually, each of these aspects of the film is a standalone piece of absurdity, but taken together they add up to...something. I don't know yet WHAT that something is. But the venom, the VENOM of everyone in this movie for everyone else, the hatred that pervades every scene, in the end just serves to glue all the delirious anachronisms and movie monster mayhem together into one big hateful craft project from Hell.

I don't know why Blood affected me the way it did, or why I can't stop thinking about it. But I have to think that that fact alone--the fact that something in Milligan's shoestring, misanthropic vision won't get out of my head, refuses to be forgotten or ignored--means SOMETHING.

Taken on a sliding scale to its resources, the acting in Blood is actually not bad. Dr. Orlofski in particular handles his role admirably, and a few of the bit characters (the female servant, her husband Orlando, the crooked lawyer and the inquisitive landlord) turn in memorable performances as well. So while no one will win any awards, in the world of shoestring productions, Milligan has a good cast here.

"Hate hate HATE HATE HATE!!!"

I didn't know much about Andy Milligan before watching this, but afterwards, fascinated, I did more research. The erudite and entertaining Bleeding Skull has a thoughtful retrospective of Milligan's filmography (http://bleedingskull.com/features/milligan.html), of which Blood is reportedly the most accessible--other entries are said to contain more gore, more strangeness, more nudity (none in Blood), and more hate.

Though I don't know quite what to make of Andy Milligan, I do know that I want to see more of his work. Maybe it will give more clues to why I'm so fascinated. Or maybe not. Whatever the other films reveal, Blood is an weird piece of no-budget cinema that trash fans everywhere need to see.

2.5 befuddled thumbs up.

"Ay WUBB OOOOO!"

PS--Since originally viewing Blood and jotting down my thoughts about it, I've purchased and read the excellent biography The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan by Jimmy McDonough. Milligan is indeed a fascinating, tragic, one-of-a-kind character, and his experiences in grindhouse filmmaking and the Warhol-era NY art scene make for riveting reading. He was not the kind of guy you'd want to hang out with, but definitely an original, for better or worse. I highly recommend the book to those interested.

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