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Spooky Kooky Ray Dennis Steckler chews the fat about low-low-low-budget moviemaking By Chris Baker Writer/director/cinematographer/actor Ray Dennis Steckler has used a lot of weird psuedonyms over the years. He's been credited as Cash Flagg, Sven Christian, Harry Nixon, and Wolfgang Schmidt, to name a few. Steckler is also responsible for one of the wildest (and longest) movie titles in cinema history, the 1963 mindboggler The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies. (It was init-ially called The Incredibly Strange Creatures or How I Stopped Living and Became a Mixed Up Zombie, but this title was altered due to a threatened lawsuit over similarity to Dr. Strangelove's full title.) After a less than stellar initial run, Incredibly Strange Creatures... was re-released to the midnight circuit with the equally bizarre monicker Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary. The constantly shifting names are the perfect metaphor for the amazingly uncategorizable cinema of Ray Dennis Steckler. Steckler's work features all of the amateur-ish acting, goofy pacing, lousy sound mixing, and uneven shot continuity beloved by Mystery Science Theater 3000 addicts. But while most low-low-low-budget movies set out to approximate the look and feel of mainstream Hollywood, Steckler's don't. He uses elements of slapstick, parody, horror, sci fi, thriller, and musical, but you couldn't tie his films to any specific genre. Ray Dennis Steckler makes Ray Dennis Steckler movies. "My career's never been boring," Steckler says. His movies have never been boring either. Steckler was one of those hand-to-mouth visionaries who existed on the outermost fringes of Hollywood. Despite having no money and no connec-tions, he somehow managed to get film after film made. Ed Wood Jr. (Glen or Glenda, Plan 9 From Outer Space) was the undisputed king of this style of moviemaking. "Ed Wood, now there's a genius," says Steckler. "If you just analyze the whole situation with him, he did his own thing all the way, got his movies made, got them distributed, followed them through the best he could, used people that Hollywood never gave work to." But Steckler runs Wood a close second. Ed Wood's 1950s films paraded his kinks and obsessions -- pink angora, overblown dialogue, cross dressing, and operatic melodrama. Steckler's equally distinctive films of the early- and mid-1960s have a freewheel-ing, bohemian, anything-goes sensibility more suited to their time. He is the most improvisa-tional filmmaker imaginable. The 1965 jaw-dropper Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monster (full title: The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Green Grasshopper and the Vampire Lady from Outer Space) is a loose-limbed homage to the old Bowery Boys movies. The story seems to have been made up on the spot. Steckler stars, and the movies was filmed around his home on Lemon Grove Street. In his masterpiece, the indescribable 1964 film Thrill Killers ( aka Mad Dog Click, aka Maniacs are Lose), a series of kidnappings and swinging parties and murders and gun-fights culminate in a pitched chase on horseback and motor-cycle. Again, Steckler stars. In Incredibly Strange Creatures... zombie attacks are interspersed with stripteases, carnival rides, stand-up comedy, song and dance numbers, and nightmare squences. One of the co-stars is Atlas King, "the Greek Fabian," sporting an incredibly tall pompadour and an impene-trably thick accent. Steckler stars as a bohemian who cringes at the word "job." He's turned into a mindless psycho by a gypsy Liz Taylor look-alike with an enormous wart on her cheek. As if that weren't enough, movie ushers were supposed to attack the audience with fake axes during all of the murder scenes. (The ads screamed, "MONSTERS COME REAL! CRASH OUT OF SCREEN! INVADE AUDIENCE! ABDUCT GIRLS FROM THEIR SEATS!") "I like things that just happen. I hate to plan things," Steckler says. The one of-a-kind 1965 film Rat Pfink a Boo Boo exem-plifies this aesthetic. It's one of the most astonishing stories in B-movie history. "My ex-wife Carolyn was being harrassed by dirty phone calls. So I said, 'Let's do a film about that.' The original title was The Depraved. We shot all this serious stuff for the beginning of the mo-vie. Then about halfway through, Ron [Haydock, star of the film] and I went to Sears Roebuck one day and he picked up this ski mask and put it on. I said, 'You'd make a great Batman, great comic strip hero.' And then I said, 'You know what? I've got an idea ....'" In the middle of this tense crime thriller, the star [Haydock] and a minor character [Titus Moede] suddenly step into a closet and emerge as super hero Rat Pfink and his faithful sidekick Boo Boo. The movie instantly switches course, and becomes an insane parody of the already campy "Batman" TV show. The origins of the nonsensical title are equally legendary. "The first story was that the artist made a mistake, printed Rat Pfink a Boo Boo instead of Rat Pfink and Boo Boo and I just didn't have the money to fix it, so I just let that one go. The real story is that my little girl, when we were shooting this one fight scene, kept chanting, 'Rat pfink a boo boo, rat pfink a boo boo ....' And that sounded great! But when I tell people the real story, they don't wanna hear it, so you better print the legend." Steckler admits that his career has had its ups and downs. "I was penniless, absolutely penniless, working different jobs. Once we took three 16mm prints of my films, and we went to Hollywood and Vine. We put them on the bench right where the bus picks you up, and nobody even stole the prints. We couldn't rent them, and nobody would even steal them." But nowadays, he's a cult hero for indie filmmakers all over the world. Steckler looks forward to introducing this retrospective of his incredibly strange films, and telling some of the incredi-bly strange stories behind them. "We're gonna have some fun. We always do. I don't even think about what I'm gonna do 'til we get up there on stage." Tues/12-Wed/13, Rat Pfink a Boo Boo, 7:15pm; Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters, 9:30pm. Fine Arts Cinema, 2451 Shattuck, Berk. 848.1143. Thurs/14, 7:30pm. Incredibly Strange Creatures... & The Thrill Killers. Parkway Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. 814.2400. Chris Baker ([email protected]) is a freelance writer living in Oakland. [ East Bay | Metroactive | Archives ]