In all candor, till now I’ve never felt particularly drawn to the cult of Ray Dennis Steckler. I have a vague memory of seeing it in the early days of home video, when it would have been a pasty presentation, either pan&scanned or cropped right down the middle. Nothing about it spoke to me or stuck with me at that time. Part of the fault would have been the crude presentation, but consider too that the outstanding references of that time were books like the Cult Movies books, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, and the Medved brothers’ Fifty Worst Movies of All Time(which called it the worst film of all time) and Golden Turkey Award books. Even Lester Bangs’ enthusiastic 1973 essay (included in his book Carburetor Dung and Psychotic Reactions) praises it with a put-down: “Like BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS and a very few others, it will remain as an artifact in years to come [to] which scholar and searchers for truth can turn and say ‘This was trash!””
It was the fashion of that time, 40+ years ago, to write about such outlying films as objects of folly, as freaks of a nature dictated by the Hollywood norm. Until recently, my outstanding memory of Steckler’s THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES!!? (1964) was not the film itself but of making a compilation of unbelievably bad musical production numbers for a friend, in which I included three from the Steckler film, which I’m not even sure I ever made it through. The title doesn’t exactly encourage us to take it seriously.
But times have changed. Not only has the literature about such films dramatically evolved and broadened over time, but the work of filmmakers such as David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Darren Aronofsky, Lars von Trier and Yorgos Lanthimos (to name only a few) have bent the norm of contemporary cinema itself. Our access to an inconceivably wider range of films via discs and streaming has also ripped off our blinders and extended our reach within and without; not only have we become more sophisticated in our selections, we are now reinventing the familiar through senses far more cultured than they were once upon a time.
Watching THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES!!? from Severin Films’ THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE FILMS OF RAY DENNIS STECKLER box set, I felt myself in the grip of a very special experience that, for whatever reason, simply wasn’t available to me before. The booklet notes explain that the movie “was scanned and restored in 4K from its 16mm camera reversal AB rolls. One such reel could not be located and therefore was scanned from the corresponding reel of its 16mm dupe negative.” The restoration by Sebastian Del Castillo, with color correction by Steve Peer, turns up the heat on Steckler’s fever dream, giving even its most down-to-earth scenes the richness of vintage Kodachrome photography. It’s unbelievably beautiful. The framing is correct and we’re no longer looking at a blown-up, blown-out 35mm print source; imperfections are no longer being fired into our retinas twenty-four times per second. For the first time we have unobstructed access to the purity of effort and vision that went into this film, well ahead of its time, and we can now also readily compare it to other, later films whose obvious spiritual alliances change its category and raise its value.
The films of David Lynch in particular—with their Hollywood settings, their nostalgic tone, their interest in the disturbing people who inhabit the margins and shadows of mainstream life, and their fascination with fugue states and otherworldly production numbers—offer an invaluable regulator through which to process this delirious work.
I was so captivated by THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES… that I couldn’t just review it; it was important for me to chronicle what I saw as I watched it, and watched it again with its delightful director’s commentary. Steckler addresses his most costly ($38,000) and famous film like he’s on a comfortable raft floating down a mnemonic river to eternity, looking back at sets and locations and people that he brought together a lifetime ago in an inexplicable ceremony of art. He wasn’t overthinking it (that’s my job) at the time, and he’s not interested in starting now; he was just seizing the day and making a movie—not to get rich, as so many others do, but just because he loved making movies. He speaks tenderly of almost every face that passes by, the few that stuck with him and the many others who drifted away, and sometimes offers us a background story that makes the whole feel even more miraculous. The film has a screenplay credit, but it was apparently no more than a general outline; he says he came to the set early each day, coming in as early as 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, just to be there alone and get a feeling about what he was going to do on a given day. He learned later that directors like Antonioni did the same thing. He approached it as a work of intuition, a dredging of his subconscious, of his life and his era, and it was the best he could do under the circumstances.
The disc also includes an introduction and a second audio commentary by drive-in movie reviewer Joe Bob Briggs (John Bloom). I haven’t listened to his entire commentary, which was done in character, but I heard enough to know that he takes a fairly knowledgeable approach even though he’s principally there to amuse. A fair amount of the information he shares can also be found in the Steckler commentary, but it's on a different wavelength; some viewers may prefer to approach the film as a hoot. Also included are trailers and radio spots for the film and its 1971 reissue version TEENAGE PSYCHO MEETS BLOODY MARY.
Severin Films' Steckler box set is available here on their website at significant savings.
Next up: THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES... How I See It.
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