laszlo kovacs - The Screengrab

Ray Dennis Steckler, 1939 - 2009

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."

Take Five: Ride Hard

Larry Bishop's Hell Ride opens in limited release this week. Advance buzz about the retroriffic biker exploitation flick isn't great, despite the fact that the movie features one of the most mindlessly entertaining trailers of recent years. Still, it's good to see the biker movie, a cultural leftover from the 1960s that has remained with us despite the transition of Harley culture from last refuge of dangerous lowlifes to weekend amusement of the upper middle class, survive in some form or another. For over 40 years, the lone, leather-clad biker on a flipped-back hog or amped-up chopper has been one of Hollywood's most enduring archetypes, used for everything fom a means to instill mindless terror to cheap comedy relief to, all too often, both. If Hell Ride does nothing more than give Michael Madsen a chance to play an all-new variant on his standard violent lowlife character, it will at least keep this archetype alive. Though, given that plenty of aging Tinseltown stars, writers and producers are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, it's probably not in any immediate danger anyway. While you're waiting for Hell Ride to come to your local theater -- or, more likely, given its dismal advance hype, while you're waiting for it to show up at your local video rental bargain bin -- here's five more biker movies to help you unleash your inner scuzzball.

THE WILD ONE (1953)

Laslo Benedik's teen-menace movie started it all, in more ways than one. Not only was it the first major motion picture to deal with the alleged menace of out-of-countrol outlaw biker gangs (which, a little over ten years later, would developed into a full-blown moral panic, as exquisitely detailed in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels), but it was one of the first movies to present us with the raw sexual charisma and magnetic, brooding talents of young Marlon Brando; it almost single-handedly started the 1950s craze among teen boys for leather jackets; and each gang in the film lent a name to a rock band (Brando's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Lee Marvin's Beatles). The events of the film -- which is still highly entertaining today, despite literally decades of imitators -- involve the takeover of a small California town by rival gangs of outlaw bikers; based on a story in Harper's (which was itself based on a real-life incident in Hollister, CA in 1947), it also starts a less pleasign tradition: that of ridiculously overstating the biker menace to appeal to your audience. Not only were the events in Hollister terribly mild compared to the dramatization in The Wild One (there was no real violence, and very little vandalism or criminal behavior), but the bikers involved were invited back a number of times over the years until it became something of a local tradition.

The Rep Report (October 17 - November 1)

NEW YORK: Now, here's what I'm talking about: the Film Society of Lincoln Center celebrates the successful completion of the New York Film Festival by firing its guns in the air with 10 Years and Running: Recent Hong Kong Cinema (October 17 - 25). The program ranges from Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together and 2046 to a very welcome helping of action master Johnnie To, whose steady refining of his technique and stubborn reluctance to bolt for Hollywood give his recent work a last-man-standing quality. (He is represented here by the The Mission, the 1999 brothers-in-arms shoot-em-up that was of no small help to its star, Anthony Wong, in his quest to be crowned World's Coolest Actor, and the more recent Election and its companion piece, Triad Election.) The newer offerings include Triangle, a caper flick co-directed by the three Hong Kong amigos, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To, and films by the team of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, whose Infernal Affairs is perhaps (if unjustly) best known in the U.S. as the original version of Scorsese's The Departed.