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.
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.
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| 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.
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.
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.
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