Tweet
Released by: Severin Films
Released on: September 27th, 2022.
Director: Ray Dennis Steckler
Cast: Arch Hall Jr., Nancy Czar, Arch Hall Sr., Ray Dennis Steckler, Carolyn Brandt, Brett O'Hara
Year: 1962/1963
Purchase From Amazon
The Incredibly Strange Films Of Ray Dennis Steckler Part One – Movie Review:
Severin Films's The Incredibly Strange Films Of Ray Dennis Steckler proves that there is a God by compiling the bulk of the finest filmmaker to ever walk the streets of Hollywood and then Las Vegas into a massive, daunting even, Blu-ray collection comprised of ten discs holding twenty films and over thirty hours of extra features.
This first part of our coverage of the set will cover discs one and two in the collection.
Disc One - Wild Guitar:
Ray Dennis Steckler’s 1962 directorial debut stars the inimitable Arch Hall Jr. (he of The Sadist fame) as an all American boy next door type named Bud Eagle. He wants to make it big in the rock n roll world and so he decides to travel by motorcycle with only his suitcase and his guitar to the big city of Los Angeles, California – Hollywood! - in hopes of getting his break. On the way, after walking by Dino’s Lounge (featuring a great Dean Martin face on the sign), he stops off at a roadside diner for a meal and meets a lovely young woman named Vicki (Nancy Czar) who also has dreams of fame and fortune. Bud falls for her pretty hard and pretty fast.
When Vicki, who is also madly in love with Bud, books him a gig on the country's hottest rock n roll show, he whips out his wild guitar and goes to town, blowing away the crowd with his sick rockabilly tunes and even slicker hair. His barn raising performance brings him to the attention of record mogul Mike McCauley (played by our hero's dad and the film’s producer, Arch Hall Sr., who co-wrote the movie with Bob Wehling!) who quickly signs him up and, with some help from his right hand man, Steak (played by Steckler himself, credited as Cash Flagg), starts managing him.
As Bud's career starts to take off, and we learn that he sucks at ice skating, his life style starts to get pretty wild. Will he and Vicki still be able to make a go of it? Or will he be lured away by crazy strippers and overzealous fan club members... or, worse yet, will he fall prey to a gang of crazed kidnappers?
A charmingly goofy movie by any gauge, the ninety minute feature moving along at a pretty good clip and not completely coming to a screeching halt during the odd musical number. It's also interesting in how it explores the sometimes very predatory nature of the entertainment business and the exploitation of the individual that often times goes hand in hand with Hollywood aspirations. It never goes particularly deep into that subject matter, the movie was clearly geared towards the teen audience of its day, but it does at least explore it a bit, and with a fair amount of cynicism at that. This sets it apart from other rock n roll/beach party movies made around the same time.
Arch Hall Jr. carries the film. He’s got a weirdly watchable face and a giant, coiffed, blonde pompadour on top of it and he’s just got an odd, quirky look that somehow really works for the character. We can buy him as a naïve, small town goofball with big dreams and his awkward chemistry with super cute Nancy Czar is somehow strangely charming. Hall Sr. is pretty fun to watch as the sleazy record mogul and Steckler himself quite amusing as his right hand thug. It’s also worth pointing out that Vilmos Zsigmond did some of the camerawork on this picture, quite a few years before going on to a more mainstream Hollywood career.
The Wild Guitar is as goofy as they came and very much a product of its time, but it’s also a whole lot of fun and plenty entertaining.
Disc Two - The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?:
The late, and yes, great Ray Dennis Steckler's improbably titled The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, made in 1964, is arguably one of the director’s better known films, if only because of its ridiculous name.
Despite the complexity of the title, the film’s plot is actually pretty simple - a woman named Madame Estrella (Brett O'Hara) has a giant Lemmy-sized mole on her face and runs a fortune telling booth at a carnival, but she's got a bad side to her. We see this when she and her gnarly looking assistant, (Don Russell as Jack Brady), murder a guy in the pre-credits sequence by throwing acid at him when the poor drunken bum doesn’t take too kindly to her flirtations. At this same carnival arrives a guy named Jerry (Steckler, once again under the awesome alias of Cash Flagg), his moderately attractive girlfriend, Angie (Sharon Welsh) and their strange mutual friend, Harold (the equally awesomely named Atlas King), who has an Eastern European accent and a pompadour. They watch a woman named Marge (Carolyn Brandt, who was Steckler’s wife), dance for a bit
Jerry is instantly smitten with a burlesque dancer at the carnival named Carmelita (Erina Enyo). We never learn why there's a burlesque show at this otherwise very family-friendly seeming carnival but it's best not to question Steckler's logic, or lack thereof. Anyway, Carmelita makes cutesy eyes at him. Angie is not amused, and Jerry has Harold take her home while he checks out Carmelita’s act. Well, as luck would have it, Estrella, who is in cahoots with Carmelita, is some sort of master hypnotist and somehow manages to turn Jerry into a mindless zombie who kills at her bidding.
Angie finds herself on Jerry's hit list, and you can't really blame him as she isn’t really the nicest person you’ll ever meet, but good old Harold jumps in and stops Jerry before he can cut her up - at this point they realize something is wrong with Jerry, and then Estrella throws acid at people and Jerry runs around on the beach like a spazz.
Famously lampooned on Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? sure is something. Reportedly made for a cool thirty-eight grand, Steckler’s second feature film got a lot of play, thanks in no small part to the director’s tendency to rename and reissue the movie (it’s also been known as the shorter and easier to remember The Incredibly Mixed-Up Zombie, the nonsensical but catch The Diabolical Dr. Voodoo and, the best of the bunch, The Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary). The film doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and, like pretty much all of his work, was clearly shot fast and cheap. It’s never once even close to frightening and as a horror movie, it’s a complete failure – so it’s surprising in a way that the movie is as wildly entertaining as it is. Logic is thrown out the window from the start and never thought about again as the so-called plot goes in twenty different directions at once. We get a few wonky murder set pieces, a couple of musical numbers that add nothing to the film, and some strange dance numbers that pad out the film and only serve to add to its WTF qualities.
Some important names like Joseph V. Mascelli (returning from Wild Guitar), Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond all worked on this film early in their careers, but it never feels like anything less than a Steckler production through and through. Filmed in ‘Terrorama’ and Eastman Color, it rarely makes much sense but it moves at a pretty lunatic pace, with Steckler himself delivering an impressively committed and, in the later part of the movie, admirably manic performance.
The Incredibly Strange Films Of Ray Dennis Steckler Part One – Blu-ray Review:
Wild Guitar is presented in AVC encoded 1080p and framed at 1.66.1. It was scanned and restored in 4K from its original 35mm camera negative, the restoration having been provided by Nicolas Winding Refn. The transfer, which uses 26GBs of space on the 50GB disc, looks excellent. There’s lots of detail here and the image is pretty much pristine. The black and white picture shows really good contrast and nice, deep black levels and the image always looks perfectly film-like. Miles above what we’ve seen this movie look like before, the picture is free of any noticeable compression issues, noise reduction or edge enhancement. All in all, it looks fantastic.
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? is also presented in AVC encoded 1080p high definition. Framed at 1.75.1, the movie was scanned and restored in 2K from its 16mm camera reversal AB rolls. The liner notes state that one reel “could not be
located and was therefore scanned from the corresponding reel of its 16mm dupe negative.” The restoration was by Sebastian Del Castillo and the color correction by Steve Peer. Not quite as crisp looking as the first feature this is still a really big upgrade over the previous DVD edition. Colors typically look really strong here and detail is solid, though some softness that would seem to be inherent in the original photography is noticeable. Still, we get a very film-like presentation with nice, natural grain and very little actual print damage. The disc is well-authored and there are no problems with compression. This is, by and large, a really strong transfer. The transfer uses up just under 21GBs of space on a 25GB disc.
Both films get 24-bit lossless DTS-HD 2.0 Mono Master Audio with optional subtitles offered up in English only. Wild Guitar has a little bit of minor hiss in a few spots but for the most part sounds very clean. It’s properly balanced, clear and it has about as much depth as can probably be expected. There’s a bit more noticeable hiss on The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, it’s pretty much there throughout, but thankfully it’s always in the background and not especially distracting. The film sounds fine otherwise, it’s balanced well and the musical numbers have quite a bit more depth than you’d probably expect them to, they actually sound really good!
Disc One - Wild Guitar:
Bud Eagle Rocks is a new interview With Actor Arch Hall, Jr. that clocks in at thirty-six minutes. It opens with modern day footage of Hall riding his Harley before getting down to business. Put together with a good sense of humor, in this piece Hall talks about why he likes living on the water in Florida, background details on his father's life and career and how he grew up poor and then got into show business. He talks about growing up in California, how his dad started Fairway Productions, the toils of working in independent film in the fifties and sixties, getting into the entertainment business himself, working on The Choppers and Eegah before starring in Wild Guitar, how much fun he had working on the movie and, of course, what it was like working with Steckler on the movie. He speaks pretty favorably of Steckler, noting how he'd do anything that was required to get the movie made and to keep making a living, even if that meant making porno movies. From there, he talks about making The Sadist and how he landed the role in the movie as well as what it was like on set. The Sadist's cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, also shows up in this piece to talk about his experiences working on The Sadist and the impact that it had on his career. From there, Hall goes on to discuss working on The Nasty Rabbit and Deadwood '76, working with his dad on both pictures, and then what happened when he got out of the acting game and went into aviation as a career. He then talks about reconnecting with Steckler towards the end of his life and how he looks back on his acting career quite fondly.
The Incredibly Strange Film Show Season 1, Episode 2: Ray Dennis Steckler is a forty minute episode from the excellent British TV series from 1988, this one going over Steckler's career in quite a bit of detail. Made up primarily of interview footage with Steckler himself (at one point cruising around Las Vegas in the back of a limo) he talks to host to Jonathon Ross about his various exploits and film productions. There's plenty of clips used from throughout Steckler's career here, with commentary from Ross, and we learn about some of his career highlights, some of the people that he worked with over the years, the marketing behind some of his movies, his work as Cash Flagg (Steckler even does an in character interview as Cash Flagg at one point), the difficulties of working on low budget productions and having to live with mistakes like the titling error on Rat Fink A Boo Boo, the darker and bleaker films he'd make once moving to Las Vegas and more. It's a great piece worth checking out if you haven't seen it before, some of the interviewees with the people Steckler worked with are pretty illuminating and there's some fun behind the scenes footage included in here as well, with Ross goofing around on set.
Master Of The Grind is an archival interview with Ray Dennis Steckler running just under forty-six minutes. Shot in 2008, it allows Steckler, in his own words, to talk about his training and thoughts on film school, how it's important to capture random moments in time on film or video, his thoughts on his later career and making films for his own friends and fans, using a dog to get out of a fine in court, his thoughts on grindhouse cinema, working with Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács, how people who only care about money won't make it long term in the film business, how it's important to truly love what you're doing, the influence of Cecil B. DeMille on his own work, his thoughts on working with actors, memories of shooting specific moves like The Thrill Killers and quite a bit more.
The disc also includes a theatrical trailer for the feature, menus and chapter selection options.
Disc Two - The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?:
Most of the extras on this disc are carried over from the older Media Blasters DVD release starting with an introduction By Joe Bob Briggs that runs for seven minutes and sees him go over the basics of the story and its wonky release history. Joe Bob also contributes a commentary track that is definitely worth listening to if you haven't heard it yet. He goes into all sorts of detail about the different cast and crew members that worked on "the masterpiece of Ray Dennis Steckler's career," hoochie coochie girls, American sideshows and carnivals, how the film sometimes serves as a document of the vanished fabric of America, background info on Steckler's career and marketing practices, the odd quality of Brandt's performance in the movie, how the film does a poor job of showing off the actual carnival, the musical numbers used in the movie, what the hypno-wheel may or may not be, the inordinate amount of close up shots that Flagg gets in the movie, Steckler's use of establishing shots and how they don't really establish anything, some of the amazing decor on display in some of the costuming, how a whole lot of people in the movie didn't really do much else and the film's unusual conclusion. It's a really fun, interesting and entertaining listen.
Up next is an audio commentary with Ray Dennis Steckler himself, also carried over from the older DVD edition. Steckler talks about the different locations that he used for the movie, working with Zsigmond and Kovacs on the movie, who built the sets that were used for the movie, where he got most of the cast members from, using the man who put up the money for the movie as the drunk murder victim in the opening scene, using his wife Carolyn Brandt in the movie, parts of the movie that he'd like to take out and that he doesn't think work so well, what happened to some of the people who worked on the movie with him decades ago, the use of music in the movie and details on the singers that were used in the musical numbers and other specifics relating to the making of the movie. It's an interesting track, Steckler's memory is pretty solid and while he does occasionally just kind of tell us what we're already looking at one screen, for the most part he keeps the track worth listening to.
We also get two interviews taken from the aforementioned DVD release. First up is a thirteen minute piece with Steckler who talks about getting into trouble with Stanley Kubrick over the title's significance to Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, working on a low budget by most standards but a good budget by his standards, inserting the musical and dance numbers into the movie because his wife was a dancer at the time, what his relationship with Brandt was like, memories of the different cast and crew members and more. A quick archival interview with Carolyn Brandt is also included on the disc. Over three minutes, she talks about working with Steckler on the movie, shooting in an old Masonic Temple in Glendale, where the stage sets and costumes came from and some of the people she collaborated with in certain scenes.
Four minutes of deleted scenes are included here. They show off the carnival setting that our three heroes explore at the beginning of the film while and are set to the film's two musical numbers, 'Shook Out Of Shape' and the goofy scat singing that Teri Randal does in the nightclub scene, a highlight here being a bit where Steckler gets really excited about cotton candy.
Finishing up the extras are an original trailer, a VHS trailer, the ‘Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary’ re-release trailer, a ‘Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary’ radio spot, menus and chapter selection options.
The Incredibly Strange Films Of Ray Dennis Steckler Part One - The Final Word:
The first two discs in Severin Films’ The Incredibly Strange Films Of Ray Dennis Steckler Blu-ray collection offer up his first two features in excellent presentations and with a nice array of extra features that do a really great job of exploring their respective histories and the lives of the people who made them. Fans of screwy cult pictures and low budget oddities take note, you should probably consider this stuff essential.