The first of Andy Milligan's UK made first and the last he did in black and white, set in the East End of London. We find a young man, called Dink staggering the streets unwell until he collapses and encounters Dee who comes to his aid.
She brings him home and the two eventually fall into a relationship, however this leads down to a dark road where Dink seems to be getting better and more positive about life but brought back down by Dee's cruelty.
We later find that Dee comes from a well to do family, despite telling Dink she has no family bar an aunt but has run away to live in London in her rundown apartment though occasionally calls home when she needs money but refuses to go back to her family.
Her cruelty reveals itself more with trying to not let Dink's friend come see him and then she throws Dink out in a rage and he ends up falling off the roof of their building to his death.
We then see a similar scene of a man coughing and staggering the East End to be stopped by Dee asking if he needs help....
Nightbirds is definitely a different style of film to what Milligan is known for, it still suffers from not being a great film but also has some charm of a kitchen sink drama that somewhat plods along. I think Milligan was trying to be a bit more serious with this film and not as camp and bloody as previous films.
Despite being on for 74 minutes, I found that some scenes did tend to linger to long and some of the dialogue was a bit of a ramble. Some of the plot could have been written out a bit better, would have liked to know more of Dee's past and maybe her relationship with the landlord.
At one point this film was considered lost until director Nicolas Winding Refn bought a bit lot off eBay (I think) of Milligans films and materials, at which to fund this as he paid £25,000 grand for it, he directed a commercial!
A print of Nightbirds was found in this and Refn worked with BFI to bring this out on Blu Ray, though when doing this, it was found that some scenes were missing but lucky for us all Something Weird had the missing scenes required in their vast collection. I believe this would have been down to Milligan cutting these scenes from the negative to make the trailer to save money as think he did this on a few films!
Berwick Kaler who played Dink and worked with Milligan in all four of his UK made films is a bit of a local kind of, being from South Shields and has been on a lot of local shows like Spender, Auf Wiedersehen Pet amongst other shows not set in the North East of England. I find this pretty cool someone from South Shields worked on some interesting and weird cult films by Andy Milligan!
Along with the BFI release, this film is included in the boxset Severin put out a while back of Andy's films.
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