The Screengrab : laszlo kovacs

Ray Dennis Steckler, 1939 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

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:

Take Five: Ride Hard

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

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.

EASY RIDER (1969)

By 1969, the myth of the outlaw biker had transmogrified from simple post-WWII recreational activity to mysterious urban legend to full-blown moral panic, and finally, as evidenced in this notorious countercultural masterpiece, a counter-symbol of true freedom and the flight from small-mindedness and oppression in the face of stultifying all-American values. By the time Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson strapped on the helmets and hopped aboard their custom Captain America choppers, they were engaged in full-fledged reverse myth-making, transforming the rebel biker from the sort of dangerous threat to small-town America that Hopper had played a number of times in other, lesser exploitation movies to a vision of the divine fool, the holy innocent who, while he might consume barrels full of psilocybin and acres worth of grass, was in fact all that was good and decent about this country. And then, wouldn't you know it? Some greaseball redneck goes and blows his head off, just to be a dick. While there's certainly qualities to Easy Rider that make it a treat to watch (most especially Nicholson's performance, Laszlo Kovacs' cinematography, and bits of Terry Southern's screenplay), it's very much a product of its time; you may be glad it exists, but you're likely to spend a lot of time wondering exactly what happened back then.

GIMME SHELTER (1970)

Since Hunter Thompson didn't have a film crew with him when he was writing his Hell's Angels book, the Maysles Brothers' masterful documentary about the Rolling Stones' notorious concert at Altamont is likely to remain the definitive treatment of the most infamous of all outlaw biker groups on film. Unsurprisingly, it shows them at their worst but doesn't entirely play fair: while everyone knows the story of how the security at the concert was disastrously handed over to a lot of drunken, rowdy Angels who worked cheap and didn't care whose head they bashed in, and while there's no doubt that their killing of black concertgoer Meredith Hunter was an overreaction (and the racial slurs they deployed against him didn't help their cause one bit), it was only later made clear that the bikers had been right about Hunter: he was, as they'd said, been carry a gun, waving it around recklessly, and behaving in a very suspicious manner. Filmed evidence of this was why Hell's Angel Allen Passaro, who was primarily responsible for Hunter's death, was acquitted of murder. But as with most stories involving outlaw bikers, the truth got muddled and the legend got exaggerated: Altamont became widely known as the exact time and place that the Sixties died, and the Hell's Angels' reputation as lawless maniacs grew deeper and darker.

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

After decades of imitators, parodies, and its own decreasing dividends in terms of sequels, it's hard to remember exactly how exciting the Mad Max movies were when they first came out. Hard, that is, until you sit down and watch one all the way through. Made at a time when Mel Gibson was still an electrifying performer and not a living self-parody, and directed by a George Miller light-years removed from feel-good movies about talking pigs, they still hold up a gold standard for smart, anarchic, terrifyingly high-velocity action movies, and Mad Max 2 -- more commonly known in the U.S. as The Road Warrior -- is the best of them. It's one of the best action movies of all time, and unlike most movies featuring car crashes, postapocalyptic wastelands, and murderous bandits who look like they were once members of Charged G.B.H., it doesn't sacrifice a shred of intelligence while bringing us its heart-stopping thrills. With oil recently clearing $300 a barrel, gas hitting over $4 a gallon, and many people -- both serious economic thinkers and paranoid tool-shed ranters -- considering what a "post-peak oil" world might look like, now is a good time to contemplate a future without gasoline, where deranged biker gangs run amok, and say: actually, that looks kinda cool.

BEYOND THE LAW (1992)

While public interest in outlaw biker gangs started to die out in the 1970s and had almost totally faded by the 1980s, the biker gangs themselves never went away, and even today, a fringe element of the culture is responsible for some fairly heinous drug dealing and the sort of violent turf wars that go with them. In 1982, an Arizona undercover cop infiltrated one such gang in order to bring them down after a particularly brutal drug killing, and Playboy magazine carried his compelling story. Over 10 years later, HBO produced this dramatic action thriller based on Dan Saxon's story, and while it didn't attract a great deal of attention at the time, it has gone on to become a bargain-bin cult classic, thanks largely to its highly realistic depiction of undercover procedures and its unusually literate storytelling. Okay, admittedly, some of the dialogue is a bit hokey, and Charlie Sheen looks absolutley ridiculous in a biker beard and leather vest, but it's a tightly constructed, nasty little thriller that's a lot better than it has any right to be. And hey, who's that playing a violent lowlife? You guessed it: Michael Madsen! How far we've come...

The Rep Report (October 17 - November 1)

Peter Smith — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

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.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music presents its sixth annual selection of highlights from the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (October 18 - 21). The program, which plunders the vaults of the Danish studio Nordisk, includes documentary footage of the German front lines during World War I, as well as fanciful adventures involving trips to Mars, runaway meteors and the ever-present fight against the white slave trade. Film preservationist Serge Bromberg will also be on hand with yet another of his personal selections of precious silent rarities. Most screenings will feature live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

Sergei Bondarchuk's adaptation of War and Peace, which is playing the Film Forum in a seven-hour cut (shown in two parts, with a separate admission for each) from October 19 through November 1, is somewhere between a great lost film and a towering curiosity. As much an example of technological competition between the Cold War powers as the space race, it was in production for seven years and cost $100,000,000 in 1968, which makes it still the most expensive movie ever made. Yet it's not just an historical oddity. Bondarchuk, who first gained celebrity as an actor (he plays Pierre in the film), was a greatly gifted director clearly drunk on the possibilities of filmmaking. There are many stunning moments and a striking, dynamic use of the camera that take the film out of the Masterpiece Theater/Merchant-Ivory category of embalmed classics; despite the impossibility of fully capturing the novel on film, it's not a negligible achievement. This was only Bondarchuk's second movie, and he never got to follow it up; after it won him an international acclaim and an Academy Award, he blew his reputation on the 1970 English-language bomb Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon, then came crawling back to Mother Russia, only to spend the rest of his career snarled up in the compromises and political confusion of the post-Khrushchev, pre-glasnost era. He died in 1994. To now see the one film that forms the bulk of his career is to marvel at what driven and talented people are capable of putting on the screen, and what the strain of doing it, and the desire to do it again, can sometimes do to their lives.

BOSTON: When Martin Scorsese's great concert film The Last Waltz came out in 1978, one of the most talked about moments in it was the single, unbroken shot for most of Muddy Waters' performance of "Mannish Boy." On the DVD commentary, we learned it's a wonder that Muddy got into the movie at all. Scorsese had gotten his song list mixed up and given the camera crew a break, and then when the blues legend strolled out onstage, the director, thinking that no one was recording the moment, had a fit collosal even by his standards. The reason that one sustained shot exists is that one of the star cinematographers working on the project, Laszlo Kovacs, didn't know that he was supposed to be on a break; he had taken his headset off because he had somehow grown weary of the sweet music of Martin Scorsese screaming in his ear. Kovacs died last July, and the Brattle pays tribute to the work he did in his career prime with Seventies Shooter: A Tribute To Laszlo Kovacs, running through the 25th. And since the series begins with such films as Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider and then winds down with one of the earliest requiems for the 1960s, Shampoo, and the rough-housing, "un-P.C." cop comedy Freebie and the Bean, it doubles as a rare chance to see the counterculture rise and fall in the space of a week's worth of films.

— Phil Nugent