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."
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