The Incredibly Strange Films of Ray Dennis Steckler on Severin Blu-ray

Over the last few years, Severin Films has released exceptionally curated retrospective Blu-ray collections of exploitation and cult film pioneers like Al Adamson and Andy Milligan. Now they turn the spotlight on Ray Dennis Steckler with a 20-film box set that spans the filmmaker’s entire career from his 1962 debut, Wild Guitar, to 2008’s One More Time, an oddball sequel to arguably his most famous film that was made just prior to his death in 2009. Factor in short films, alternate cuts, footage from unfinished projects, copious interviews and commentary tracks, as well as a 100-page book—not to mention the gorgeous restorations of the films themselves—and you’ve got one of the most essential home video releases of the year.

In many ways, Wild Guitar, a raucous exposé of recording industry corruption made by producer-writer-actor Arch Hall Sr. as a starring vehicle for his son, is the odd man out in this set. Essentially a work-for-hire, Hall advised Steckler to stick close to the script, leaving scant room for the unfettered inventiveness that characterizes his preferred approach to filmmaking. Nevertheless, this is a well-made, thoroughly entertaining film with Steckler turning in the first of many performances in his own films as the amusingly named Steak.

Boasting arguably the greatest title in film history, 1964’s The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies shows Steckler in complete creative control over what was billed as the first ever monster musical. Arguably Steckler’s masterpiece, the film certainly lives up to that bit of ballyhoo. It’s a giddily carnivalesque tale of mutilation and mind control, featuring a surprising amount of existential malaise. What the film also reveals is that Steckler can be called a bona fide American surrealist. His improvisatory approach to storytelling is akin to the surrealist technique of automatic writing: He began the shooting day by sizing up the set or location in a meditative manner, only then figuring out what was going to happen. As a result, Incredibly Strange Creatures unspools like a lividly hued fever dream, and it contains a truly dazzling dream sequence that utilizes a fascinating array of performance art, razor-sharp editing, and delirious multiple exposures.

Working chronologically through the films in this set, you begin to notice that, owing to a sense of playful self-referentiality, they all seem to take place within the same cinematic space. (Call it the Stecklerverse.) This tendency toward the self-aware starts out simply enough with the appearance of posters for earlier Steckler movies that are visible in the background. A Wild Guitar poster, for instance, turns up on a dressing room wall in Incredibly Strange Creatures. A mask from Incredibly Strange Creatures in turn serves as a throwaway gag during a pool party in 1966’s bizarre Rat Pfink a Boo Boo, which begins as a straight crime drama before spiraling into a superhero parody. Things get more convoluted in 1964’s The Thrill Killers, which leavens its brutal antics concerning a trio of escaped madmen with a satirical take on Tinseltown that sees real-life producer George J. Morgan playing a fictionalized horndog version of himself.

The Lemon Grove Kids, a trilogy of short films that serve as a love letter to the Bowery Boys, doubles down on the intertextuality. In the titular first segment, Gopher (Steckler) literally runs into the ending scene of Rat Pfink a Boo Boo, momentarily bringing to a standstill the climactic battle between Rat Pfink (Ron Haydock) and an escaped gorilla called Kogar (Bob Burns). The third segment (knowingly titled “The Lemon Grove Kids Go Hollywood!”) has Carolyn Brandt revisiting her role as jobbing actress Cee Bee Beaumont from Rat Pfink, and even includes a scene set in the real-world Steckler-Wester Film Productions offices. The middle section (“The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Green Grasshopper and the Vampire Lady from Outer Space”) boasts some really wild costume and set designs, suggesting Steckler’s affinity with the pop culture-inflected mythos of George Kuchar, just as the more infernal elements of his 1970 shrieky psychodrama Sinthia, The Devil’s Doll brings Kenneth Anger to mind.

Be sure to watch the alternate cut of 1971’s Blood Shack titled The Chooper, because all of the overtly meta elements have been removed from the former version. Either way, this is a surprisingly elegiac horror movie made on one location in Pahrump, Nevada, for a budget of around 500 bucks, but only in the alternate cut does Brandt, who was married to Steckler at the time, play a fictionalized version of herself as a disillusioned scream queen eager to escape the demoralizing depredations of Hollywood. Once again, posters and publicity stills feature prominently in the set design, only this time they’re actually the topic of discussion between Carolyn and ranch hand Daniel (Jason Wayne), when he expresses an avowed enthusiasm for the bloody goings on that they depict, an admiration Carolyn cannot bring herself to share.

After most of what little cast there is in The Chooper winds up dead, Carolyn muses that she’ll worry about it all tomorrow, “if tomorrow ever comes,” a weirdly disenchanted dictum that’s accompanied by a shot of the setting sun. The film exudes a palpable aura of discontent, inviting a certain amount of biographical speculation, especially since the film marks a shift between Steckler’s L.A. productions and the ones that he went on to make in Las Vegas, a change that reportedly had a deleterious influence on his family life. On a more bizarre note, the costume worn by the titular sword-wielding maniac was donned by a strange creature in the middle segment of The Lemon Grove Kids, further looping in connections with earlier Steckler films.

The Chooper also sees an end to Steckler’s genre productions (at least until later in the decade), since he spent most of the 1970s and ’80s churning out porno films, several of which are available in this set. The titles included here all sport some sort of horror or Nazisploitation elements, and as such serve as hardcore variations on the aforementioned softcore (and totally bonkers) Sinthia, the Devil’s Doll. The set then moves forward to an outlier from the late ’70s, The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher, a tangibly tawdry saga of mad love and mutually assured destruction between the titular psychos. Also included here is it’s 1986’s sequel, Las Vegas Serial Killer, which continues Steckler’s referential habits by featuring a party at Cash Flagg’s house, Flagg being the name he routinely acted under.

Late in his life, Steckler made a number of films using nothing more than consumer-grade camcorders. One More Time, from 2009, plays like an “extension” of Incredibly Strange Creatures for its first three-quarters, featuring the return of Steckler’s Jerry character from that film, until he flips the script to reveal it’s all been a dream of renewed glory before ending things on a far more mundane and melancholy note. Divided into four “takes,” and running more than four hours long, 2006’s documentary Reading, Pennsylvania is an exercise in (and philosophical rumination on) nostalgia, as Steckler returns to his hometown for his 50th high school reunion. The film ultimately develops into a rather poignant examination of the methods a filmmaker can utilize to capture the multifaceted realities of a city.

The first section of Reading, Pennsylvania serves as an overture, set entirely to music, as Steckler and his wife make their way across country from Las Vegas to Reading, then tour the streets of the town. Along the way, we witness various scenes and characters that Steckler will return to (and expand upon) in later sections. Only at the very end is there any use of sync sound for an interview with a local journalist who provides us with some needed context about life in Reading. The following segment exhibits a more straightforward man-on-the-street interview technique while touching on topics that range in significance from where to get the best food to how to improve on city life under current political conditions.

Reading, Pennsylvania’s final two parts return to Steckler’s career-spanning fascination with films that are in dialogue with other ones. The third section consists entirely of Steckler participating in a screening and discussion of the first two segments of the film at the now-defunct Melwood Screening Room in Pittsburgh, after which he methodically interviews the handful of attendees about their responses. The final segment sees Steckler returning to his hometown for a Reading on Film festival, a vast swath of which consists of Steckler focusing his camera on a screen showing a variety of advertisements and other bits of film that showcase Reading over the years. Taken together, these multifarious “takes” on Reading add up to an unexpectedly moving three-dimensional portrait of an American city.

These late films indicate the twofold nature of Steckler’s approach to the surreal. On the one hand, there’s the focus on the dream life that features prominently in more than one Steckler film, allowing him to indulge in free-associative imagery, from the mesmerizing hypno-swirl in Incredibly Strange Creatures to the writhing painted nudes in hell of Sinthia, the Devil’s Doll. (Most of Steckler’s dream sequences are vibrantly colored.) But alongside that—and grounding the realism from which his surrealism springs—is Steckler’s painstaking attention to the here and now, “stolen” moments in time (often street scenes shot without benefit of permits) that turn up time and again throughout his work. So Steckler’s films ultimately succeed both as playful exercises in various genres as well as surreptitious documentaries that chronicle times and places now long gone, for which they continue to serve as poignant indices.

The Incredibly Strange Films of Ray Dennis Steckler is now available on Blu-ray.