Wild Guitar (1962).
The films of low budget director Ray Dennis Steckler present a unique balancing act between familiar B-movie tropes and the unexpected. With Wild Guitar (1962), The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies!!? (1964), The Thrill Killers (1964), and Rat Pfink A Boo Boo (1966), Steckler, a self-acknowledged Hollywood outsider, crafted a series of idiosyncratic low budget features in the heart of Tinseltown before eventually decamping to Las Vegas in 1970 for a career in porn and to teach film classes at the University of Nevada. In these energetic early films, his characters—drifters, rock ‘n’ rollers, killers, dropouts, superheroes, and struggling actors—seem to be plucked from Hollywood Boulevard and set down in a pulp comic come to life. The Hollywood strip appears again and again in the director’s films as a symbol of intoxicating fantasy and disillusionment. Indeed, Steckler’s work embodies, at first glance, a simple teenage dream of celebrity, violence, and goofy humor, but what lurks just below its campy, threadbare veneer is an underworld of cynicism, reflexivity, and rupture.
In perhaps the definitive interview with the director (in the invaluable Incredibly Strange Films), Steckler told writer Boyd Rice, “I'm not saying I'm a great filmmaker or anything; I try to just be different, not to be like everybody else. That's all it is.”
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Steckler began making films as a boy using an 8 mm camera purchased by his father to create an amateur pirate movie with his friends. After leaving the Army, where he had been a photographer, Steckler came to Hollywood and found a job as an assistant cameraman on Timothy Carey’s cult masterpiece, The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962), eventually becoming the film’s cinematographer after the initial director of photography was fired.
After working as a cinematographer and occasional actor at Arch Hall Sr.’s Fairway Pictures (including a brief but memorable role as a frightened partygoer in the gloriously dumb caveman movie Eegah), Steckler directed his first feature film, Wild Guitar, for the company when he was only 23 years old. Like many of the other films produced by Fairway Pictures, Wild Guitar was a vehicle for Hall’s son, Arch Hall Jr., who he hoped to make a star.
In the film, which plays suspiciously close to a teenbeat version of The World’s Greatest Sinner, Arch Hall Jr. plays a would-be rockstar who comes to Hollywood from nowhere with an old guitar and a letter of introduction to no one in particular. The naive ingenue is quickly taken in by a crooked record company owner, Mike McCauley (Arch Hall Sr.), and his gang of buffoonish hoods, including Steckler (using the screen name Cash Flagg) as McCauley’s enforcer, Steak. Formally, Wild Guitar might be Steckler’s most ostensibly “normal” film but the vision it conjures of exploitation in the entertainment industry, and the vapid, mesmeric power of pop, is vicious.
“I believe: get an idea, go make it. Just do it,” Steckler told Rice, and in Wild Guitar, Steckler’s openness to unexpected resources and improvisation pays off. While filming, the director learned that actor Nancy Czar was a world-class skater, and took the shoot to an ice skating rink (years before Rocky) to create one of the film’s most memorable scenes. The sense that Steckler is making his film his way is palpable, and although Arch Hall Jr.’s subpar songs are shoehorned throughout, the director is doing what he would ultimately learn to do best: working with what he had.
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964).
Steckler’s next film represents a giant leap forward into the “psychotronic” realm. In The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?—shot in just 11 days—Steckler plays Jerry, a hoodie-wearing misfit who would rather bum around the boardwalk looking for fun than get a job. After visiting a sideshow fortune teller who turns anyone who crosses her into a monstrous, half dead creature, Jerry is placed in a hypnotic state that causes him to kill. Hallucinatory mayhem ensues.
Beyond this minimal plot, The Incredibly Strange Creatures (his largest budget film at a meager $38,000) is filled with elaborate dance numbers (including a dream ballet), wildly unhinged camerawork (courtesy of a young Vilmos Zsigmond), grotesque makeup, and home movie-like sequences of carnival rides. In this film, perhaps Steckler’s best known work, he pushes beyond normative formal constraints as his camera careens between stylized precision to raw expressiveness like a tilt-a-whirl, creating a trash pastiche of bad vibes, psychosexual tension, and wonderfully cheap spectacle.
The film’s dark, nightmarish interiors and gleeful disregard for camera etiquette combine to make it unsettling and immediate in a way few films are. Its script (although there are claims Steckler often worked without one) echoes the camera’s nonconformist streak. The most memorable and profound bit of dialogue from any Steckler film comes in The Incredibly Strange Creatures as Jerry encounters an uptight young man, Madison, outside his girlfriend’s house. He flippantly asks the young man, “How’s college?” Madison responds, unamused, “It’s fine. You should try it some time.” Jerry, tickled by this, grins and volleys back, “No thanks. The world’s my college.” With this dismissive barb, both Jerry and Steckler might be speaking—Jerry about his approach to life, and the director about his exuberant, freeform approach to DIY moviemaking.
Co-produced by Steckler and his partner, George Morgan, the film’s financier, The Incredibly Strange Creatures was initially distributed as part of a double bill by Fairway Pictures. Eventually, Steckler took the film out on the road himself and showed it under a number of different titles (Diabolical Dr. Voodoo and Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary) to relative success—relative to the film’s small budget, that is.
Steckler’s next film, The Thrill Killers, was a gritty crime story featuring a wide-eyed Steckler as escaped mental patient Mort “Mad Dog” Click. After a bravura stylized murder sequence where “Mad Dog” proclaims, “I hate people. They’re no good,” as light pulses through a dingy flophouse window, the film’s action culminates with his fellow escapees taking a group of diner patrons hostage. One of the hostages, Joe Saxon (Joseph Bardo), is a struggling film actor, which leads to the film’s most darkly reflexive moment, as the escaped patients “direct” their hostages.
The Thrill Killers, with its stark black-and-white, pseudo-documentary photography, and pervasive threat of violence, is Steckler’s most economical and potent slice of pulp dread. In a similar fashion to Steckler’s travels with the The Incredibly Strange Creatures, The Thrill Killers included a personal touch. Also called The Maniacs Are Loose, Steckler advertised that the film was in “Hypno Vision,” meaning, at key points during the screening ushers, and often Steckler himself, would race through the aisles eliciting screams from the audience. The Thrill Killer’s double life as both a grim work of cinematic art and schlocky spookshow encapsulates Steckler’s knack for slyly slipping his unconventional films into commercial spaces.
Rat Pfink A Boo Boo (1966).
Steckler would follow The Thrill Killers with his most radically playful film: Rat Pfink A Boo Boo. Beginning with the same “just for kicks” criminality and violence as TheThrill Killers, Steckler’s followup makes a radical departure halfway through its running time. After a young woman, Cee Bee Beaumont (Steckler’s wife, Carolyn Brandt), is kidnapped, her rockstar boyfriend, Lonnie Lord (Ron Haydock), enters a closet with a dimwitted gardener, and the pair emerge as superheroes. The film’s second half becomes a goofy riff on Batman and Robin, as the duo pursue the kidnappers in slapstick fashion.
Steckler considered The Thrill Killers, with its true crime feel and depiction of violent, abnormal psychology, his answer to Psycho. It’s in Rat Pfink A Boo Boo, though, where he enacts Hitchcock’s narrative rupture. By using many of the same motifs and actors in between The Thrill Killers and Rat Pfink A Boo Boo, Steckler creates a weirdly solipsistic cinematic continuum.
After Rat Pfink A Boo Boo (in slipshod, Steckler fashion, a mistake with the titles turned “And”into “A”), the director would work on promos for rock groups like Jefferson Airplane and continue to make a few more kooky curiosities including the Long Goodbye-like lazy detective film, Body Fever (1969). Nothing, however, would ever reach the heights of conceptual and poetic brilliance of Rat Pfink A Boo Boo, which stands as the director’s last uncompromising masterpiece.
Ray Dennis Steckler’s true art was his attitude toward filmmaking, believing, “If you can’t have any fun don’t make a movie.” Echoes of this inspired approach can be seen in the films of John Waters, David Lynch, Damon Packard, and Nicolas Winding Refn (an avid fan who helped restore Wild Guitar). Although Steckler’s films were initially set adrift in the sea of B-movies and drive-in second features that filled American theaters during the 60s and 70s, people eventually began to take notice. The Incredibly Strange Creatures was cited by critic Lester Bangs as a masterpiece of bad taste and as his New York Times obituary states, “Mr. Steckler’s name began to be mentioned with those of genre masters like Russ Meyer and Ed Wood.”
Steckler uniquely faced the reality of making movies on the fringe with the barest of resources and negotiated an uneasy but fruitful treaty between the actual and the possible, all while having a good time. What resulted from his giddy desire to make movies is something incredibly strange and remarkably special.