Ray Dennis Steckler, who died of a heart attack this past week at the age of 70, was, to put it delicately, a major figure in unconventional poverty row cinema of the last fifty years. After a stint in the army, Steckler moved to Los Angeles in 1962, where he found work as a cameraman and cinematographer on such films as Wild Ones on Wheels, Secret File: Hollywood, and The World's Greatest Sinner, the legendary Timothy Carey vehicle that gave its soundtrack composer, Frank Zappa, his first big break. Steckler continued to move in fast company when he teamed up with Arch Hall, an independent exploitation movie mogul who was peddling his guitar-playing simian-faced offspring, Arch Hall, Jr., as a potential teen idol. Arch Senior gave Steckler the chance to make his directing debut with the Arch Junior vehicle Wild Guitar, in which both Arch Hall, Sr. and Steckler also had acting roles, playing crooked music promoters under their favored thespian nom de plumes of, respectively, "William Watters" and "Cash Flagg. (Steckler, as Cash Flagg, also appeared in Hall's Eegah!, in which Arch fils ran afoul of a caveman played by Richard Kiel.) In 1964, Steckler directed, produced, and starred in the film probably best associated with his name(s), The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. (The film also makes use of the dancing talents of Steckler's then-wife, the very hot brunette Carolyn Brandt.) The film, a near-indecipherable mix of filmed variety acts and horror elements involving a plot about a carny fortune teller with the habit of using hypnosis to turn her victims into marauding killers, would attract lasting attention in no small part due to its title, which was actually one of those lucky accidents you hear about. Reportedly, Steckler has originally planned to call the movie The Incredibly Strange Creatures, or Why I Stopped Living and Became a Mixed-up Zombie, but for some reason the legal department at Columbia Pictures informed him that this was too close to the full title of Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb for comfort. Steckler would also try out such alternate titles as Diabolical Doctor Voodoo and The Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary during the movie's run, which he also spiced up by storming through the aisles of some theaters where the picture was playing, wearing a monster mask and attempting to menace the bemused patrons.
What Steckler could not anticipate was that he had not only created a work that become a cornerstone of the cinema of "so bad it's good", or at least "so bad let's light up a spiff and get off a few wisecracks", but that he had created, in the phrase "incredibly strange", a cult euphemism for "surreally godawful." In 1973, the movie got a big boost in cultdo, when Lester Bangs wrote an article for Creem (later republished in Bangs's posthumous collection Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung) in which he made comic hay just by describing the experience of trying to make sense of the movie as it flickered across his TV screen. (Trying to sum up "Cash Flagg"'s onscreen presence, Bangs suggested that the auteur looked like Pete Townsend of the Who crossed with Alice the Goon's brother.) Steckler himself--who followed Incredibly Strange Creatures up with Rat Fink a Boo Boo, a curious attempt to send up a send-up, the "60s Batman TV series, before drifting into porn (which he directed under such pseudonyms as "Harry Nixon" and "Cindy Lou Sutton")--would later be interviewed, with Brandt, by Re/Search Publications for the thick 1986 volume Incredibly Strange Films. A couple of years later, he was profiled on British TV by Jonathan Ross for Ross's series about "underground" fimmakers, appropriately called The Incredibly Strange Film Show.
Last year, Steckler used his MySpace page to announce that he was casting a forty-five-year-in-the-making sequel, Incredibly Strange Creatures: One More Time. The finished product, his final film, is due to be released straight to DVD later this year. One incredibly, or at least fairly strange footnote to Steckler's career: he gave two legendary immigrant cinematographers their starts in American moviemaking. Vilmos Zsigmond worked as second unit D.P. on Wild Guitar and as a camera operator on Incredibly Strange Creatures (credited as "William Zsigmond"), before his first real job as cinematographer, on the Arch Hall, Jr. vehicle The Sadist; and Zsigmond's fellow Hungarian refugee, the late Laszlo Kovacs, worked as assistant cameraman on Incredibly Strange Creatures, under the name "Leslie Kovacs."
Ray Dennis Steckler on The Incredibly Strange Film Show, Parts One through Four:
