The Incredibly Strange Films of Ray Dennis Steckler

Ed Wood got the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp treatment and the paradoxically legend-making anointing as the worst director of all time, but among true aficionados of cult films that look cheap, are populated by bad actors, and have outrageous plots, Ray Dennis Steckler is up near the top. Have you ever heard of the movie with one of the most memorable titles of all time, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, much less seen it? Most of those who have seen it lately only know it from the version shown on MST3K. Well, let's face it, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies was destined to be riffed upon by Mike, Crow and Tom Servo if only because of that title. One of the weirdest bits of movie trivia is that this low-budget horror freak-out movie that cost less than $40,000 to make actually had small sections filmed by two cameramen who would later become two of the most sought-after cinematographers in movie history: Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Szigmond.

If there is such a thing as an auteur, and there's not, then Ray Dennis Steckler was an auteur. By which I mean he wasn't. Steckler wrote, acted, directed, produced, operated the camera, edited, and also had the talent to come up with terrifically engaging aliases under which he carried out these duties: Cash Flagg, Sven Hellstrom, Wolfgang Schmidt, and even Cindy Lou Sutters. The latter was the name under which he directed a series of T&A films in the early 80s. Yes, Ray Dennis Steckler continued directing films well into the 1990s, but it is his wild and even innovative low-budget masterworks from the 1960s for which he'll always be remembered. Well, always as long there are MST3K-type fans who actively search out movies that don't make it onto that list of the recurring twenty movies a month that are deemed suitable for repeated airing on the major cable channels.

Steckler's first foray into directing was Wild Guitar, one of the endless series of films from the late 50s and early 60s about young rock and rollers getting into trouble in the music biz due to the fact that, as has been pointed out before, all executives in the music industry as the spawn of Satan and should be waterboarded using that juice found in cans of Vienna Sausage. Wild Guitar stars another icon of this era of the drive-in flick, Arch Hall, Jr. who quite possibly had the weirdest face in movie history until Renee Zellweger came along.

It would be Steckler's third movie that truly elevated him into the Valhalla of low-budget, cult film heaven. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies is not Plan 9 From Outer Space. Oh sure, it's got bad acting and at times seems merely an excuse to film a nightclub music show and present it as a movie. If you can put aside the disorienting and disquieting fact that only on rare occasions does one scene naturally lead into another, you will discover hidden within this little gem a surreal masterpiece almost on the level of Luis Bunuel. It's a kind of wacky 60s rebellion meets 50s Vegas hipsterism by way of gypsy curse and zombies. Yes, it is horrific, but then so was Le Chien Andalou. Anyone putting aside their film class snobbery, however, would be hard-pressed to describe how the style of Andalou is any different from Incredibly Strange Creatures. Just as Bunuel and Dali created an essentially plotless film that shocks, so did Steckler. Of course, Bunuel went on to do far grander bits of surrealism that far surpasses Steckler, but this film proves that Steckler, for at least a small period during his career, was no Ed Wood.

Equally fascinating is another oddly titled Steckler film, Rat Phink a Boo Boo. It was originally supposed to be a conjunctively titled film, but the guy doing the titles left out the "nd" and Steckler didn't have enough money to fix it. There you go. Rat Phink a Boo Boo originally began as a straightforward suspense drama called the The Depraved. (Which I'm convinced would still have been better than The Departed.) The opening sequence of the completed film was to be the opening of the suspense thriller and it's probably the best single sequence Steckler ever directed. A woman is assaulted by two thugs and while the acting is atrocioius as always, the confidence that Steckler displays in composition and editing here gives hint that had merely stuck with the ambition to become a cinematographer he might well have had a far more distinguished career. Steckler apparently was not particularly engaged by what he'd filmed, however, and got the idea for the sudden entrance of two superheroes. With this simple change, Steckler transformed his mundane thriller into a genuinely bizarre and surreal superhero comedy. In fact, Rat Phink and Boo Boo bear a startlingly resemblance to Batman and Robin of the 1960s TV series.

Except that Steckler had made his film before that show aired. In a way, then, Ray Dennis Steckler beat the Caped Crusader and Boy Wonder to the punch in terms of camping up the whole superhero bit. You can't help but laugh at the thrift store costuming of the two superheroes as they ride through the streets in a motorcycle and side car. Rat Phink a Boo Boo is a wonder to behold; much tighter than Incredibly Strange Creatures, but nonetheless just as equally disorienting. The incredibly strange films of Ray Dennis Steckler, at least his work from the 1960s, are definitely worth checking out. After all, they don't make films like these anymore. Well, actually, they do. Only today they are called summer blockbusters and cost 200 million dollars to make.