INCREDIBLY STRANGE FILMS Redux

The following collects my notes on the other major features gathered together in Severin Films' impressive and absorbing box set, THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE FEATURES OF RAY DENNIS STECKLER. I've already covered the earlier WILD GUITAR and THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES (the latter in five-part detail); the others in the set are THE LAS VEGAS SERIAL KILLER (1986); the X-rated hardcore titles THE MAD LOVE LIFE OF A HOT VAMPIRE (1970), NAZI BROTHEL (1970), LOVE LIFE OF HITLER'S NAZIS (1971), COUNT AL-KUM (1971), DR. COCK LUV (1970), THE SEXORCIST'S DEVIL (1974), RED HEAT (1981); and three latter-day shot-on-videotape projects, SUMMER FUN (1997), the 257m homeward documentary READING, PA (2006), and ONE MORE TIME (2008), the last being a supposed sequel to THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES... I've tried to tackle the last disc of films but I just couldn't stick with them at this time. Likewise, I'm not feeling drawn to the hour-long-or-less adult titles (which, incidentally, were made by a guy who allegedly turned down Bernard Fein's invitation to work on HOGAN'S HEROES because he felt it wrong to depict Nazis humorously) but may check them out at some future date.    

 

THE THRILL KILLERS (1965, 69:57, 1.85:1): In the wake of THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES…, Ray Dennis Steckler stepped away from the juvenilia of carnival, monsters and rock ‘n’ roll with this startling shift into brutal criminality and violence—perhaps prompted by his erstwhile partner Arch Hall Jr.’s surprise drive-in hit THE SADIST. The story, which opens à la WILD GUITAR with starstruck visits to Hollywood landmarks, is fairly simplistic: an ambitious, out-of-work Hollywood actor (Joe Bardo) and his sexy wife (Liz Renay) are having marital problems when they run afoul of a surplus of deranged killers who have escaped jail (Gary Kent, Herb Robins, axe-wielding Keith O’Brien and “Cash Flagg” as Mort “Mad Dog” Click) and dispatch other characters early on. Carolyn Brandt, playing yet another long-legged damsel in distress, brings a striking sense of dance choreography to her action scenes, and—past a certain point—the action scenes are virtually non-stop, interrupted only by appropriate preludes of suspense. Filmed in 35mm by the ISC team, in mildly stylized black-and-white, this is undoubtedly Steckler’s best-looking film, graced with impactful cutting and an impressively consistent forward drive. The climax includes a remarkably effective dummy death and an audacious, improvised stunt sequence wherein “Mad Dog” Click takes to horseback like a natural to flee a pursuant motorcycle cop, despite Steckler’s avowal that he’d never been astride a horse in his life. Also making a potent impression is Laura Benedict (Gary Kent’s girlfriend at the time) in her only screen role as the manager/cashier at a lone truck stop restaurant with the usual Stecklerian décor; she never made another picture though she leaps off the screen like a west coast Juliette Gréco. There are self-referential moments peppered here and there, with brazen (and not particularly flattering) cameos by the film's producer George Morgan and erstwhile producer Arch Hall, Sr., and a wham-bam swan song appearance by the unforgettable Atlas King. 

RAT PFINK A BOO BOO (1966, 67:05, 1.85:1): The first 40 minutes or so of this celebrated silliness is dead serious, depicting a woman being bullied after dark by another trio of psychotic toughs - very much a continuation of what Steckler was doing with THE THRILL KILLERS, but then pulls what must be the screen's most abrupt whiplash switcheroo. When rock ‘n’ roll star Lonnie Lord (Ron Haydock, introduced signing autographs for three female fans with his right hand outside the Capitol Records building, while holding his guitar in the other) learns that his girlfriend CeeBee Beaumont (Carolyn Brandt) has been abducted by these unhinged lunatics, he sits down with gardener Titus Twimbley (Titus Moede), plays a mopey song on his guitar (the lyrics confusingly frame the abduction as the girlfriend’s rejection of him), and then the two men go behind a locked door to emerge as the pervious-to-bullets superheroes Rat Pfink and Boo Boo. This film actually predated the ABC-TV hit series of January 1966 and was likely inspired by the 1965 “An Evening with Batman and Robin” reissue of the original BATMAN Republic serial, yet it’s very much attuned to what the TV show became. Carolyn Brandt, when showcased in joyous mode in romp sequences with Haydock, set to Haydock's own Gene Vincent-influenced music, is a revelation here; it wouldn't be out-of-line to liken her pop appeal and spontaneity to Anna Karina. The attraction of fun—which THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES… seemed to warn against—gets the better of Steckler here, but that’s not to say it isn’t just as infectious to the viewer. If you've not seen this film, be advised it's more layered than you may be expecting and hard not to embrace. The wonderful Bob Burns guest stars as his gorilla alter ego, Kogar. 

THE LEMON GROVE KIDS! (1968, 78:15, 1.33:1): Also known as THE LEMON GROVE KIDS MEET THE MONSTERS. Steckler’s love letter to the Bowery Boys and his San Diego neighborhood was produced as three two-reelers (“The Lemon Grove Kids,” “The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Green Grasshopper and the Vampire Lady from Outer Space” and “The Lemon Grove Kids Go Hollywood!”), then collected and released theatrically as a feature-length film. This is wholesome, wacky, fun-loving entertainment best suited to children, particularly the children of an earlier, simpler time—not unlike, say, Barry Mahon's kiddie matinee fodder if notably smarter. Made when Steckler’s own kids were young (and already acting onscreen), I suspect he made these shorts mostly for their pleasure, as something to perhaps infect them with the movie bug as he had been, and also to preserve the magic of that time of young parenting for Carolyn and himself. This is probably his most personal work yet, of all the material in this set (despite the return of Rat Pfink and Kogar in COLOR), I relate to it least though it does reveal another, warmer side of the artist: his deep love of people, neighborhoods, community - and of course, filmmaking. In his commentary, Steckler relates a heartbreaking story about his admiration for East Side Kids/Bowery Boys actor Huntz Hall, whom he briefly befriended, invited into his life, and wanted very much to feature in one of his movies. The cast includes Carolyn Brandt (as the Vampire Lady, and reprising her RAT PFINK role of CeeBee Beaumont), Ron Haydock, Bob Burns, Titus Moede, and the final credited appearance of Cash Flagg. Steckler’s direction credit is shared with Peter Balakoff and Ed McWatters.

BODY FEVER (1969, 77:45, 1.85:1): Ever since Arthur Conan Doyle admitted to Sherlock Holmes’ predilection for a seven-percent cocaine solution, the private eyes of detective fiction have been designed according to their personal eccentricities. John D. Macdonald’s Travis McGee, for example, headquarters on a houseboat and, one year before he first came to the screen in the person of Rod Taylor in Robert Clouse’s DARKER THAN AMBER (1970), Steckler made this film, starring (under his own name, this time) as downtrodden LA gumshoe Charlie Smith, who worships Bogart and wiles away his down time aboard a sailboat called the Rogue. Though this film, like his others, was made on a negligible budget and without a finished script, it has a pretty strong backbone thanks to the improvisational grit of experienced actors like Bernard Fein, Coleman Francis and Herb Robins. No one would ever mistake this as anything other than an American film yet it draws visual inspiration from Franju’s JUDEX (the ever-lithe Carolyn Brandt cat-burgles in a snakeskin leotard and mask), Lelouch’s A MAN AND A WOMAN (in its warm yet non-explicit sex scenes), and scenes of joyous, exuberant running whose roots may extend to Richard Lester’s Beatles films or perhaps Louis Malle’s ZAZIE. Shot in Los Angeles and Utah, most of the interiors were shot in Steckler’s and Brandt’s own home and the strangely measured naivete, humor and grit of the piece (about Smith’s risky attempt to recover and neutralize a large bag of stolen heroin) gives this one a somewhat Frenchified, Cassavetes-like feel and pegs this one as the KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE of his filmography. 

SINTHIA THE DEVIL’S DOLL (1970, 77:04, 1.85:1): Scripted by actor Herb Robins, Steckler photographed and directed this highly experimental skin flick as “Sven Christian,” an alias that hints at the Bermanesque elements in the storyline. In psychoanalysis, Cynthia Kyle (Shula Roan aka moonlighting schoolteacher Bunny Allister) struggles to come to terms with an emotionally confused past in which she, sexually jealous of her mother, killed both her parents en flagrante by setting their bed afire. Instead of telling the story in a straightforward way, Steckler (and Robins) opt to delve inside Cynthia’s psychosis, opening up in a feverishly, color-saturated mindscape recalling earlier works by Bergman (THE MAGICIAN, THE HOUR OF THE WOLF), Roger Corman (THE TRIP), Curtis Harrington (NIGHT TIDE), numerous Jess Franco titles yet to come (EUGENIE DE SADE, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR, etc), and particularly the shorts of Kenneth Anger. The supporting cast features Gary Kent and Maria Lease (familiar from her appearances in Joe Sarno and Al Adamson films). Dumped as it was onto the sexploitation circuit, this daring and surprisingly accomplished psychodrama went unrecognized as anything exceptional but this is one of the outstanding examples of the kind of art film that could and should have been sanctioned more often by the then-new X rating. 

BLOOD SHACK / THE CHOOPER (1971, 55:10 / 70:10, 1.33:1): With its direction credited to “Wolfgang Schmidt” (because Steckler had determined that he could no longer even “give away” any film he’d properly signed), this picture was reportedly filmed produced for “about $500” in Death Valley, California. Carolyn Brandt plays herself, albeit as a down-on-her-luck horror movie star who, after two unhappy marriages and a stalled career, inherits some sparse desert ranch property from the beloved “Uncle Jim” who produced her past matinee hits. (The dead uncle’s office is this film’s shrine to past Stecklermania, and by the time we reach this feature in Severin’s box set we realize that these pressbooks and photos taped to the walls in all Steckler features were his way of anticipating this digital compendium.) A stone’s throw from her inheritance is the shell of a dumpy, supposedly 150-year old house with nothing more than a hideously soiled mattress inside; the barren, birch-veined property is said to be the host of a terrible Indian curse. Whenever someone enters the place, a murderous shadow figure known as “The Chooper” is manifest to claim their lives with (I guess the first weapon that came to hand) an Excalibur-like sword. 

    Co-written with Ron Haydock (who essentially authored Brandt’s voiceover narration and also stars in the one-note role of Tim Foster, a neighboring landowner who wants to buy her allegedly water-rich property), the lack of a real script is more noticeable here than in other Steckler pictures yet his camera eye finds intermittent beauty and wonder in the scenic desolation; he somehow succeeds in creating Hellmanesque western cinema from its confluence of random visual action (including documentation of at least one local rodeo) and improvisational business between the actors, including his two young daughters Linda and Laura. Even without a script, Steckler manages to allude to rising tensions between corporate and native America as it approached its "Bicentennial" year, juxtaposing the ancient curse with images of a rodeo flag “that never looked more American” and the star-striped, red-white-and-blue slacks that Brandt sports in the last act.

    BLOOD SHACK is the tighter, more polished presentation with a more traditional orchestral score, but THE CHOOPER is more fascinating, being ultimately more personal, more meta, in its candid references to the filmmaker’s earlier work. At 12:15, this film actually made me jump when the actress engulfed in black shadows (Laurel Spring) brings her own hand suddenly into the light. 

    Aaron AuBouchon’s commentary is a well-argued defense of THE CHOOPER. Steckler’s own commentary is unexpectedly lazy and mechanical and also disingenuous when he boasts of subconsciously borrowing from THE MISFITS while elsewhere denying that he took anything from PSYCHO, when the otherwise unnecessary character of property caretaker Daniel (Jason Wayne) is presented as a likely schizophrenic who invites the Chooper to keep on choppin’ ‘em down and he’ll keep buryin’ ‘em. In the end, he’s nothing more than a red herring, while the real Scooby Doo villain behind the Chooper turns out to be the most obvious suspect. If only Steckler had embraced his tendency to self-myth-making and revealed himself (or Uncle Jim) to be the Chooper, pretending to kill people to have something to make a film about! Also, try to count how many times the male characters lose their hats on the windy locations. It’s virtually a subplot. Worth noting is Steckler’s comment about seeing this film ideally on a big screen “in widescreen,” as it’s correctly represented here in 1.33:1 and would have been miserably cropped in even the most lenient widescreen ratio.

THE HOLLYWOOD STRANGLER MEETS THE SKID ROW SLASHER (1979, 70:52, 1.33:1): Also from “Wolfgang Schmidt,” this badly-titled, no-budget, essentially silent picture actually serves up an interesting idea: in Los Angeles, a middle-aged man (Pierre Agostino) mourning the loss of a loved one, poses as a photographer to gain intimate access to a series of models and hookers, whom he sees as the artifacts of a world in moral decline; he is surprised to find himself attracted to a severe-looking woman (Carolyn Brandt, divorced from Steckler by this time) who manages a miserly used book shop next door to the Flick Theater (showing DEEP THROAT and THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES)—when not moonlighting as the city’s other serial killer, who goes around knifing drunks and vagrants for much the same angry, disillusioned reason. Again, Steckler’s refusal to properly script the film (binding everything together with elliptic narration) prevents this idea from achieving its full potential, but as seen in the context of this retrospective box set, the film conveys a powerful illustration of Hollywood’s 15-year decline from the days of his earliest pictures, with their awestruck depictions of the Capitol Records building and the handprints outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater now replaced by porn theaters, liquor stores and escort services. By extension, the film holds up a judgmental mirror to the plummeting standards of American exploitation cinema and mourns Steckler’s earlier sense of artistic vitality and creative hope with a souring, if still diligent, sense of craftsmanship. Agostino also stars in the subsequent THE LAS VEGAS SERIAL KILLER (1986, 76:11, 1.33:1), which plays like a half-hearted postscript to this film, recycling a couple of scenes from the earlier picture (as well as rodeo footage from THE CHOOPER) while vainly pursuing the former glitz of Hollywood to Las Vegas. By this time, Carolyn Brandt had moved on and Steckler had lost the glue that held his cinematic universe together. 

The INCREDIBLY STRANGE FEATURES box set contains a veritable banquet of extras on each of its 10 discs; for a complete breakdown of the contents, and for the best available price on the set, I recommend you go directly to Severin Film's official store here. I will mention, however, that all of the films listed above (with the exception of SINTHIA, unfortunately) are accompanied by Steckler's own (previously released) personal commentaries, which are relaxed, playful and consistently informative. Also provided are feature introductions and commentaries by Joe Bob Briggs, which are highly listenable and well-organized but generally poke fun and repeat Steckler's anecdotes. THE THRILL KILLERS features a commentary by Christopher Wayne Curry, author of THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE FEATURES OF RAY DENNIS STECKLER (a book heretofore unknown to me), while BODY FEVER offers a track by DEAD EYES OF LONDON blogger David Dent. These both feature a lot of spirited play-by-play and are addressed to fans in search of entertainment and background trivia rather than critical insight. My own tastes favor the commentary tracks for RAT PFINK A BOO BOO and THE CHOOPER, which are the work of Aaron AuBuchon, a professor of film studies at Webster University in St. Louis. Of all the set's commentators, he has the most catholic grounding in myriad cinematic reference points; he doesn't anchor Steckler to genre, or make fun of him, even when calling into question some of his creative quirks and decisions. He finds it all very stimulating and his stimulation is infectious. My only regret is that he wasn't tapped to talk over every movie in the set. I hope he's working on a book. 

 

(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

DONNA MARIE GOLDSCHMIDT LUCAS

November 7, 1955 - October 10, 2022

AT PRESENT, VIDEO WATCHDOG IS NO LONGER ACCEPTING OR ABLE TO FILL PHYSICAL BACK ISSUE ORDERS. I BELIEVE THE DIGITAL EDITION SALES ARE AUTOMATED AND MAY CONTINUE. I WILL RETRACT THIS STATEMENT IF IT IS FOUND TO BE UNTRUE. 

PLEASE UNDERSTAND I AM SIMPLY NOT PREPARED TO HANDLE ANYTHING BEYOND AUTOMATIC TRANSACTIONS AT THIS POINT. 

VIDEO WATCHBLOG WILL CONTINUE AS SOON AS I AM ABLE TO RETURN TO MY WRITING. 

AS YOU KNOW, DONNA WAS ONE OF A KIND - IRREPLACEABLE. SHE AND I THANK YOU FOR YOUR MANY YEARS OF LOYAL ATTENTION AND ENTHUSIASM, AND THE LIFE YOU MADE IT POSSIBLE FOR US TO SHARE FOR SO LONG.

                                                              - Tim Lucas 

                                                                                                                               Photo by Linda Wylie.

My love of 48 years, the designer of MARIO BAVA ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK, and the publisher and art director of every VIDEO WATCHDOG publication, Donna Lucas unexpectedly passed away Monday morning at Mercy Health - Anderson Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, becoming unresponsive during a routine test in preparation for later heart valve surgery. She served as the office manager to GENII Magazine for the last few years of her life. She is survived by two brothers and four sisters, their respective spouses, children and grandchildren and a vast number of people who loved her from up close and afar - none closer than me.

We hoped to correct her heart problem and keep this thing running for at least another twenty years, but she has been taken from us. Our talents dovetailed perfectly, but I do not have her gifts, so necessary to keep this website functioning. Do check back occasionally to see if our status has changed. 

Please forgive this sudden and unhappy ending to our story, but if you know anything about us at all, you know it was one of the most beautiful ever told. 

Random Notes on Recent Viewings

I’m now up to the last disc in Volume 5 of THE ADVENTURES OF OZZIE AND HARRIET. Only a few appearances by neighbor Thorny (Don Defore) in this, his last season; the show is opening up to new friends like Lloyd Corrigan’s Wally Dipple, Lyle Talbot’s devilish Joe Randolph and Mary Jane Croft as the funny-voiced Clara, not to mention the fledgling musical performances of son Ricky Nelson. I’ve not said anything about these releases since the first two, where I found a number of episodes tampered with musically; it appears to have been done either to recover copyright of the restored elements or to cover periods of silence. However, this unnecessary revisionism stopped with the third volume and the restoration work has generally been sublime ever since. One of the real treats of having the entire series presented in original broadcast order is seeing, for the first time, a surprising number of episodes that disappeared from active rotation in syndication. The funny thing about these rarely seen episodes is that there is usually some content in them that may have later judged as distateful - for example, Hal Smith’s pre-Otis drunk character routines, Ozzie and Harriet trading cute kitchen banter about someday getting a divorce, some sexy appearances in several episodes by Joi Lansing, or Ricky making an off-hand reference to how Coke tastes even better with a little rum in it. (“How do you know that?” Ozzie inquires. “I, uh, read it in a book somewhere,” ad-libs the 16 year-old). Which just goes to show that the “wholesome” image that led to the show’s rejection by the counterculture in the 1960s was really only engineered in selective syndication.

Around the time of Season 4, the sponsors must have noted an absence of displays of affection between the family members; suddenly, Ozzie and the boys kiss Harriet whenever they leave the house or say good morning or good night. And in Season 5 there is a noticeable new emphasis on the family's musical heritage, with Ozzie and Harriet singing some sweet duets, the entire family banding together as a sort of barber shop quartet, and of course Ricky's coltish first attempts at rock 'n' roll. There are some real surprises too - like an episode I saw last night in which Harriet’s women’s club takes up sculpting. Ozzie assumes they’ve all shown up at the Nelson house to sculpt him, so he dresses up as a suitable model in classical Roman garb, only to return downstairs to the living room and find the women sculpting another live model - none other than a pre-Hercules Steve Reeves! Funny thing: when Reeves finally speaks, he’s dubbed (by the series’ frequent supporting player and radio announcer Jack Wagner)! I believe it's during Ricky's first singing performance of "I'm Walking'" that I spotted another bodybuilder in the audience: Brad Harris! Another episode, “The Duenna,” features the original Lina Romay, who was fun to see in this context. Halfway through the series, older son David’s maturing personality seems a little withdrawn, helped along by Ricky’s blooming talent and personality, while Ozzie has developed into a remarkable physical comedian and a pleasingly complex character: a sentimentalist but also a profoundly competitive and insecure man whose pride and boastfulness inadvertently set many plots in motion. This was also the season with show writer Jay Sommers (later the creator of GREEN ACRES) really stepped up to bat with many scripts according him top billing. Especially notable, I think, is “The Reading Room” in which Ozzie’s paternal editorializing about how today’s young people should spend more time reading the old classics leads to the family surprising him with a new reading room in the attic, which leads to fears that he may have outgrown his usefulness to the family - hilarious, but also a little existential and frightening, as Ozzie is once again hoisted on his own petard. Just great television.

* * *

When I learned the Criterion Channel was showing a new 4K restoration of Lou Reed and John Cale's SONGS FOR DRELLA performance, I watched it immediately. Originally shot in 16mm, it looks much better now than it used to, and it still sounds great. For me, the most powerful songs are up front ("Open House" always kills me), but the silent artistic connection and tension between Cale and Reed hold the viewer for the duration. What I wasn't prepared for is how young they both look. This was 1990, which doesn't feel that long ago; but Lou's been gone now for almost ten years. A stinging reminder that 30 years is nothing, and that's why I agree with Andy when he says "the most important thing is work."

* * *

We’ve spent the last several nights watching the Showtime limited series THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH. Some months back I saw a trailer for it and wasn’t attracted, but needing another series after SUCCESSION, we chose this one. Though allegedly based on the Walter Tevis novel, it’s actually a sequel to the Nicolas Roeg film with an (excellent) mostly black cast including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Naomi Harris and Clarke Peters, with Bill Nighy appearing irregularly as the elusive Thomas Jerome Newton, the character played in the film by David Bowie. Each episode takes its title from a different Bowie song, a structure which plays out surprisingly well. (Little winks to the Bowie mythos also turn up now and then.) There are little annoyances I could pick on, but most of these become surprisingly relevant to points raised by the story and illustrate the differences between basic alien and earthly temperaments. The important thing to say is that this show is a rarity among science fiction dramas of our time: a serious work of actual science fiction, not just a space opera, one that tackles the most pressing problems of our time; it’s also a worthy sequel though it does clear away some of the mystery that so nicely adhered to the obliqueness of Roeg’s storytelling. The show concludes in such a way that it could have a follow-up season if demanded, while also managing a satisfying closure on its own. Recommended.

(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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The Passion of Ray Dennis Steckler - Part 5

As morning breaks, Steckler gives his viewers a moment to absorb what they have seen by inserting some early morning shots grabbed on the fly. In his commentary, Steckler speaks of his attraction to photographing little poetic moments of reality that he's unlikely to remember otherwise and which others might never see otherwise, moments that have the impact of professional still photography. These shots are a perfect illustration of what he means and other similar moments are to be found in his other films as well.

Jerry wakes up late and, after a brief talk with Harold, who’s still under the hood trying to get his heap of junk running. (Shall I stretch the metaphor to recall that Jerry was himself "under a hood" during his own misadventure? Maybe not.) Either way, Harold returns his “kiz” and Jerry drives over to Angie’s house, where he finds Madison grilling burgers and his Angel sunbathing by the kidney-shaped pool. She's forgiving of his actions but remains “a little mad” about the way he acted. Jerry admits to some confusion about his actions on his own part. When Angie admits “I sure would like to know what happened after I left,” she raises a parasol into frame and twirls it, reigniting the hypno-whirl in Jerry’s mind.

Steckler remembered this being a spontaneous decision, prompted by the presence of the parasol at the location, and its incorporation into the scene has an eerie, nightmarish logic that's purely visual.  When the parasol is lowered, Angie has become Marge. Jerry starts to strangle her—and only Angie’s mother’s scream and Madison’s rush to her defense prevents Jerry from strangling Angie herself to death. In an editing toggle well ahead of its time, obviously anticipated by Steckler during filming, Marge and Angie flash in and out of his subjective perceptions. Madison succeeds in breaking his death grip and the spell clouding his mind, and Jerry—shocked and ashamed of his own behavior—flees the scene. 

Needing a location that would reflect Jerry's growing sense of loneliness and isolation, Steckler opted to take his minimal crew to the original Angel’s Flight Railway incline at 351 S. Hill Street in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. It had previously been used in such films as THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN (1956) and the aforementioned NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES (1948). Steckler could recall no conscious reason for shooting there; it was just something he wanted to do, but since he likely had the latter film in mind, the location would have followed, if only subsconsciously. Also, if we consider Jerry's term of endearment for Angela, his “Angel” has indeed taken flight from him (or rather, he from her) and the location externalizes her with a sad and lonely space he can inhabit. Angel's Flight ceased operations in 1969—a parallel of sorts to the seedy run-down majesty of the Nu-Pike. Quietly accompanied by the sound effect of an egg-beater to suggest the rollercoaster-like ascent and descent of the railcars, and a spiritual called “Roll On,” it’s a haunting, fugue-like moment of penitence and respite in Jerry’s nightmare.

While leaving the location, Jerry happens to overhear a transistor radio report of the Hungry Mouth murders and the ongoing police search for the killer. With the movie’s energy now on the brink of failing, it returns to the Nu-Pike where we are treated to Carol Kay’s infectious twist number, “The Shook-Out Shake.” Though it’s hardly the film’s best choreographed sequence and offers no thematic support of the narrative, it’s certainly the picture’s most catchy, memorable song and its best bid for a hit. 

 

The showgirl Stella pays a visit to Madam Estrella, showing her the newspaper headline about the murders of the two dancers and slyly mentioning that she saw Marge running out after a consultation the night before. She asks Estrella what she foretold for her, and she replies, “Nothing—because she wasn’t here last night!” After casually mentioning that she has a date tonight, Stella just as casually mentions to Estrella: “If I didn’t know you better, I’d almost say you had something to hide”—not realizing she’s thus signed her own death warrant. Ditzy showgirl.

 

Terri Randal’s scat-like “Choo-Choo-Cha-Boochie” is the next musical number, performed solo, without dancers needing additional choreography. Something in common regarding all the on-screen musical performers: they all lip-synch their songs faultlessly. Randal does a particularly good job with tongue-twisting lyric and she appears to be the only artist in the movie whose song made it to record—not this one, but rather the 45rpm single “It’s Incredible” b/w “Mixed-Up Zombie Stomp,” both composed by Libby Quinn (Elizabeth Q. Greene) and released on the REL Recording Company label in 1964.     

Jerry tracks Carmelita down to the backstage apartment she shares with Estrella. Throughout this scene, Jerry is filmed so that he is constantly framed outside and inside Carmelita's vanity mirror. Steckler's commentary asserts that he was simply making himself visible even when he paced offscreen, but it's also an eloquent illustration of his now-divided nature. He demands to know what happened last night behind the curtain.

“Well, if you really must know what happened behind those curtains, why don’t you go behind them?” she challenges him, sensibly.

At this point, the camera adopts Jerry’s POV as he approaches and parts the curtains, once again revealing the spinning Hypno disc. His senses are flooded with images of Estrella compelling him to obey and her recent meeting with Stella, who now must be destroyed.  

 

I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone who hasn’t experienced the film already. Suffice to say, the story surprisingly sticks to its guns and remains a tragedy, but it builds to an exuberant ending nonetheless. Before it concludes, the film packs its last ten minutes with a full ouse of stylistic surprises: a striking reveal of the Jerry-zombie wielding a flashing blade in the dark that seems to prophesy every single scare in John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN (1976); an abrupt turn-of-the-tables on Madam Estrella as her imprisoned horde of acid-test rejects escape and run amok (providing Steckler with the perfect opportunity to break the fourth wall with zombies-in-person theater invasions in subsequent reissues; and—just when you least expect it—another music-and-dancing extravaganza, this one set to another instrumental, "The Mixed-Up Zombie Stomp" (again anticipating Tenney's THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH, which features a Del-Aires song called "The Zombie Stomp"). As some key characters are murdered, the film intercuts the massacre with topsy-turvy images of the Sky Wheel, the Nu-Pike's double ferris wheel which, as mentioned before, had claimed actual lives of its own. The sequence of the police arriving at the amusement park and shooting down the so-called “zombies” benefits from Tom Scherman’s original rubber mask designs (which recall some of the bizarre characters from Revell’s “Weird-Oh” model kits) and the tight editing of Don Schneider, whose dynamism looks forward to George A. Romero’s muscular cutting on his own zombie films, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) and DAWN OF THE DEAD (1979).

THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES… doesn’t end happily, but it resolves its case study in irresponsibility and carelessness in bigger-than-life fashion. In the last few minutes, Steckler takes all of Mother Nature’s fury onto his own shoulders in a truly heroic culmination.

No stunt men were involved; this is real Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess in WAY DOWN EAST stuff with Steckler dead center, his performance ascending to heights that recall Brando or Nicolas Cage at their most self-involved. Just as impressive, Atlas King, Sharon Walsh, Madison Clarke and a couple of cops doggedly pursue him through the same salt water assaults in a sequence that encompasses several perspectives, including an impressive high-angle viewpoint in depth. Though its not at all a similar setting, when Jerry finally ascends a high rock, I don't think there's any question that Steckler is summoning a memory of the tragic finale of KING KONG (1933); the sequence follows much the same trajectory and pushes the same emotional buttons.

His pursued of careless fun now behind him, as misunderstanding as he himself is misunderstood, Jerry finally awakens to the real world of responsibilities and other people's feelings. Alas, it's too late and he loses his girl, his dream, and his friends in this ultimate showdown with forces larger than he. When we see Ray Dennis Steckler standing atop that crag rising out of the sea, he not only lights the candle on the cake but presents a powerful heroic metaphor for the filmmaker at bay, surrounded and diminished by all the adversities life can hurl at him. And yet, in the end—with a little help from his friends—he has somehow prevailed. Exactly what he's accomplished is ultimately for others to decide but, in one last show of pride, he plants a flag in this new (and perhaps greatest) level of accomplishment.

It reads "Made in Hollywood, U.S.A."

THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES!!?, whose very title seems astonished (if not baffled) by its 81-minute appendage, has outgrown its reputation as a bad film and demands to be regarded and discussed more seriously. A snapshot of American pop sponteneity, as it briefly existed during the first surge of the French nouvelle vague and on the cusp of the British invasion, it stands out today as a master class in low-budget technique. It also strikes me as a powerfully confessional, autobiographic, and defiantly individual work and—despite these lofty accolades—one of the most ebullient, entertainingly accessible examples of bizarre cinema we are likely to ever see.        

    

Severin Films' Steckler box set is available here on their website at significant savings.

Coming soon: THE THRILL KILLERS, RAT FINK A BOO BOO and more!

(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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The Passion of Ray Dennis Steckler - Part 4

After leaving Madam Estrella’s tent, our fun-seeking trio scan the seedy setting for their next thrill. Jerry and Harold are both drawn to a carnival barker’s exhibit of “girls, girls, girls… 20 girls and only 10 costumes” while Angie—obviously not so keen about seeing her boyfriend ogling other women—casts a contrary vote for “the fun house.” (It’s at this point when Jerry begins to address his “Angie Baby” as “Angel.”) Under pressure, she agrees to stand idly by as the men watch the pitch for a couple of minutes—but a couple of minutes is all it takes for the barker to introduce gypsy sensation Carmelita (Erina Enyo). When this “one and only woman of mystery” steps onstage, Jerry experiences a sudden, almost mystic connection—illustrated with sequential shots of both that bounce back and forth until their eyes alone fill the screen.

Jerry is entranced. Estrella is shown observing this connection from a distance and, when Carmelita briefly looks away from Jerry in her direction, Estrella nods her approval. (We later learn that Carmelita is Estrella’s kid sister.)

This is literally the turning point in the film and analogous to the origin of all evil, beginning with Adam’s temptation in the Garden of Eden. It’s another probable accident, nevertheless a conscious artistic decision, that Steckler or his cameramen more tightly composed the subsequent shot of the three main characters at their point of divergence with only a portion of Madam Estrella’s sign visible to the right—the portion that reads “Adam.”

Angie is miffed with Jerry insists on seeing Carmelita’s performance. “I thought we agreed that what I say goes,” he reminds her. When Angie tartly protests that “It’s not that show you’re interested in, it’s that stripper,” the camera cuts away to an animated midway decoration of a witch riding her broomstick with a black cat aboard, accompanied by mocking laughter that suggests the very forces of darkness behind the amusement park are mocking Jerry’s “Angel” as a catty witch.

When she storms off in indignation, he doesn’t follow her like a puppy—even at his best moments, “he wouldn’t be Jerry if he did.” Instead, he hands over his car keys to Harold, like a man intoxicated, and asks him to see her safely home. He then proceeds to pursue this embodiment of sexual mystery to his doom. The film is exactly 30 minutes into its running time as he buys his ticket to disaster.

Inside the tent (I say it's a tent but the production couldn't afford to actually erect such a thing), a crowd of ticket holders is treated to much more than the usual hootchie-cootchie show. We’re immediately treated to a full-on production number headlined by dancer Patrice Michaels. The film carries no wardrobe credit, so we can only assume that the dancers’ outfits in each number were found at Western Costume or some comparable outlet; however, the imaginative sets were designed by Mike Harrington and the dance numbers choreographed by Bill Turner (Carolyn Brandt’s dancing partner “Bill Ward”) and Allan Smith—and then filmed all in one day, with three cameras rolling simultaneously, after a single rehearsal of each. 

The dances were the first material to be filmed and actually feature lead actress Sharon Walsh with different hair. When that initial day of filming ended early, leaving Steckler time to shoot some other scenes, he ended up firing his original leading lady when she chose to keep a date with her drummer boyfriend rather than shoot scenes for her first starring role in a movie. Steckler immediately pulled Walsh out of the chorus line and gave her an offer she didn’t refuse—and she’s fantastic; one of the best actors in the picture actually.

That's Sharon Walsh at the left. 

Patrice Michaels, wearing a Vegas showgirl outfit augmented with black plumage, is introduced dead center in an array of six black doors spaced by Corinthian columns, her back turned to camera. After sashaying to-and-fro camera, she proceeds to open each door, admitting the other dancers one by one. (Sharon Walsh is behind Door #2.) Each of them is chewing gum, a spontaneous idea of Steckler’s to help them dance in shared time with absolutely no music playback on set. All of the film’s music was provided by Roy Youngman of Rel Records, which also brought to the film a ready fund of such musical talent as Carol Kay, Teri Randal and Don Snyder. Though the dance number has been ridiculed by some historians, it’s an audacious thing in its own right and something of a technical tour de force within its own severe limits. Granted, it’s as out-of-left-field as it can be, considering the film’s genre and subject matter, but it’s also clearly the work of a man who sees this film as his calling card to the industry at large, and he’s packing as much of what he can do into the picture as will fit. If it compares poorly to the level of craft that goes into an MGM musical, granted, but with very little money, second-hand costumes, and single rehearsals, it’s remarkable how much Steckler accomplishes.

After the dance number, we get a sweetly played little set-up for a later scene as the rakish carny barker (Neil Stillman) approaches one of the dancers, Stella (Tony Camel), for a date backstage. The scene then dissolves to another musical number, this one “Not You,” a country-flavored torch ballad nicely sung by attractive Carol Kay. If one listens attentively to the lyric, Kay might well be expressing emotions that Angie's character is anticipating at this time ("It only hurts / when I kiss someone new / Someone that's... not you"). 

 

Released February 10, 1964, THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES... was correctly billed as "The First Monster Musical!"—unless you count Universal's 1943 and 1962 versions of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. The earlier version was especially qualified, offering far more music for stars Nelson Eddy and Susannah Foster than opportunities for menace by Claude Rains. On June 1, 1964, Del Tenney's THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH would make a similar boast, calling itself "The First Horror Monster Musical!" The movie does beggar the question of why it opted for such a schizophrenic profile, but the reasons behind Steckler's choice are not so difficult to imagine. First of all, the young audience of this era was equally attracted to monsters and pop music (witness the success of Top 40 songs like "The Monster Mash" and "The Martian Hop," from 1962 and 1963 respectively), and Steckler was ahead of his time in playing both cards. Tenney's film would be the first to follow, and AIP's own BEACH PARTY musical series would eventually go the same route with PAJAMA PARTY (1964, featuring Tommy Kirk as a visiting Martian) and THE GHOST IN THE INVISIBLE BIKINI (1965). Secondly, we shouldn't overlook the fact that Steckler had been cohabiting with Carolyn Brandt for several years at this point, and her interests in music and dancing were a likely influence on the material—and not just to give her something to do. Finally, it also seems that, as a storyteller, Steckler had difficulties sustaining feature-length stories in his films generally. (His 1965 film THE THRILL KILLERS was originally about the three insane prison escapees only, with his top-billed "Mad Dog Click" character added at the last minute to fill the story out.) By adding the songs and dance numbers, INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES... is not noticeably padded and the songs are well-selected in terms of supporting the dramatic material thematically. They offer a virtual libretto for the story.

Then Carmelita takes the stage to perform her number. By all rights, this performance should be the show topper, but it falls short of this. Erina Enyo shows no particular talent as a dancer or stripper. The song used to accompany her performance is Dale Jimmerson’s jaunty “The Pied Piper of Love,” which suits the situation thematically (“Follow me, follow me,” Jimmerson sings) but is anything but ominous, or even persuasive. During the performance, Madam Estrella’s grotesque familiar Ortega taps Jerry on the shoulder and hands him a handwritten note from Carmelita, inviting him to meet her in her dressing room after the show. Jerry can’t wait and ends up poking his nose into the wrong dressing room, upsetting the other girls between their costume changes. “The show’s out there, not in here,” one of them chides him.

 

But Jerry soon finds the object of his mystification in a nearly pitch-black room that appears to be Madam Estrella’s parlor. There Carmelita leads him behind a curtain (we'd call it a Lynchian curtain today) that, once parted, ensnares him in the vertiginous clutches of a spinning Hypno-swirl wheel. The scene then dissolves to a broader room of the darkness surrounding the inviting vortex, inhabited by Madam Estrella, Ortega, and Carmelita.

As Estrella invades his thoughts with directions of how to think and feel, the camera very subtly tips to one side. “See only that which I choose to show you,” she bodes, and the shadows enveloping Jerry’s head narrow to a belt of light crossing his face from eye to eye. As her words take root in his consciousness, compelling him to go “deep into the spinning hole,” the shots of Jerry’s eyes begin to zoom in and out, suggesting a literal brain fuck, accompanied by a sound effect similar to a shy man’s gulp. Mock Brett O’Hara’s faux gypsy phrasings if you will; she sells this scene like gangbusters; the scene evokes macabre memories of John Farrow’s film of Cornell Woolrich’s novel NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES (1948), which—like this film—whose female protagonist shares with Jerry a fearful, paranoid attitude toward the stars.            

But what is the purpose of Madam Estrella’s taking control of Jerry? Steckler answers this question without breaking his own spell as the scene cuts to Marge returning to her Hungry Mouth dressing room. Steckler subtly tells us that we are still occupying Jerry’s unhinged perspective because the camera documenting her movements itself performs a full circle, spinning weightlessly around her image in a Hypno-twirl of its own, as she slumps into her chair. Bravely, Steckler leaves the exposition of events to his technique, his mise-en-scène, rather than to his dialogue or some other blunt basis.

 

Meanwhile, outside this dressing room, James Bowie’s stand-up comedy routine grinds miserably on, as in a circle of Hell in a David Lynch movie. It doesn’t matter than his jokes aren’t funny; everything he says relates to his unhappy marriage, which makes his routines pointedly pertinent to Jerry’s breaking of faith with his “Angel,” whose earlier palm reading predicted that such an entrapment awaited him. Bowie then introduces the next musical performer, Don Snyder, who offers an acoustic rendition of his song “How Do I Stand with Your Heart”—which again seems to offer a subtle yet emphatic parallel to Jerry’s dilemma: “I’m walking blind through this wonderland / just because I love you so.”

If we take the song as a guide to Jerry’s own sublimated feelings, starting with the morose tenor of the piece, he’s gone his own way not only because “what he says, goes” but because he’s frightened of the depth of his feelings for Angela, which could mean the end of his life of “fun.” He’s also likely intimidated by the prospect of becoming family to Angela’s disapproving, conservative mother, a possibility driven still more deeply home by the fact that, off to Snyder’s right as he performs his confessional song, in none other than Joan Howard (who plays Angela’s mother) in a dual role.

 

During Snyder’s performance, there is a cutaway behind the curtain as Bill asks dancing partner Marge if her fight with the manager is still getting her down. “It’s not that,” she admits, “it’s something that happened on the midway tonight… I’ll tell you after the show.” She never gets the chance. During their performance, Jerry emerges from behind the curtain, the hood of his sweater pulled up, blank-faced, and stabs Marge and Bill to death.

Of course, Madam Estrella is puppeteering Jerry to settle her own petty scores and also to make her own prophecies come true, but there is also a certain Freudian interest attached to the fact that Steckler has Jerry programmed to kill the character played by Carolyn Brandt, his real-life wife, rather than Angela or even her adversarial mother. Steckler’s own audio commentary and other witnesses interviewed in the Severin box set, such as Carolyn Brandt and Gary Kent, admit that the Steckler-Brandt marriage was rocky from the start; despite their mutual devotion (they were together eighteen years, married for ten), they had children immediately and were oppressed not only by financial difficulties but by Steckler’s wrestlings with his dreams and his demons, particularly his frequent affairs with other women. These very personal problems seem to lie at the heart of this film, where everything goes wrong at the moment Jerry's spirit of fun and adventure insists on his right to stray from Angela. In this regard, his stabbing of Marge is a symbolic injury dealt to his wife, and the film becomes his confession and his penitence.

We don’t see Jerry flee the scene of his crime. We don’t see whether he remembers doing the dirty deed or not. Instead, the film cuts to him sleeping restlessly in bed, so restlessly that his tossing and turning wakes Harold, whose pillow appears to be at the foot of the same bed. They’re sharing the room like two little boys, and the scene suggests that Jerry has subconsciously taken refuge in his own past innocence. Steckler shot this scene in his young daughter’s bedroom and a further note of the ridiculous is struck by the head of a Flintstones “Dino the Dinosaur” toy poking its purple head out of the shadows. As he sweats and squirms on his mattress, we dissolve into his dream...

 

As I watched this presentation for the first time, Jerry’s dream sequence is where I first felt myself in the undeniable grip of a master. Remember as you're watching: this is 1963; this is a guy who can’t even afford to shoot in 35mm; and no one on the screen has acted onscreen before. (Steckler himself is just directing here, replaced as Jerry by the male dancer Bill Turner, because Ray had to admit he was too physically clumsy himself to pull it off.) As the spinning spiral bores inside the dreamer’s head, we’re treated to an initially Felliniesque array of the film’s many women, with Marge lounging at the front of them all, her face painted a murderous shade of red. Other women’s faces are painted white, blue, even black and they mock and plague Jerry; a few of them don’t even play a specific role in this film. Angie appears, beckoning to Jerry and then commanding him, like a dog, to “come over here”—as if his nightmare is that she’s become the dominant partner in their relationship, not that he’s lost her.

The women stand together in military formation with arms outstretched, alternately locking Jerry in and setting him free like pivoting amusement park turnstiles as they twist this way and that. He sprints and darts among them like a gazelle, his own face painted in a diagram of red, black, blue and white. They finally trap him in the center and raise him up like a crucified Christ hoist on a petard of female flesh.

Steckler filmed this sequence with A, B and C reels, allowing the imagery to optically overlap with impressions of smoke, studio lighting, impressionistic tauntings, and cutaways from Jerry's subconscious to his conscious memories of being spun about similarly with his two friends aboard the Octopus. When the women finally drop him, the dream Jerry sprints away and, at one point, drops to the floor of the stage—in the exact same spot, in the exact same pose Marge struck on the floor at the moment of her own drunken embarrassment. After brief encounters with a couple of women and foretellings of numbers yet to be performed in the film, Jerry is superimposed with the spirit of the dead Marge imploring him to “help.” Obviously, it’s too late for her, so how—who—can he help?

The dream sequence runs roughly three-and-a-half minutes, and it looks and feels radically different to any other dream sequence to emerge from the horror genre at or prior to this time. Certainly there were earlier horror films that braved this form of expression, like John Parker and Bruno ve Sota’s DEMENTIA (1955) and the Pathé Color delirium sequences of Roger Corman’s Poe pictures (1960-65)—but Jerry’s dream is not merely illogical, symbolic or “psychological”; it’s actually psychedelic, with kaleidoscopic layered imagery and layers of interpretation. The only earlier work it even vaguely resembles would be the short films of Kenneth Anger. It’s four years ahead of Corman’s THE TRIP (1967).

To be continued...

Severin Films' Steckler box set is available here on their website at significant savings.

(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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