This
is freakin' embarrassing. We've been at
this for over five years, and we just
now finally get around to doing our FIRST
Ray Dennis Steckler flick!? Man, I've
let you down; I've let myself down.
We've done Wood, Mikels, and two
friggin' movies by Larry Buchanan, but
no Steckler. Hell, I like Steckler. Oh,
man. And I also just realized we
haven't done anything by Albert Pyun, Al
Adamson or Andy Milligan yet, either. Keerist
I need to get on the ball or they're
gonna revoke my union card.
*
* * *
We
open with over-the-hill actor Joe Saxon (Joe
"Brick" Bardo) aimlessly
wandering the streets of Hollywood. Joe is
taunted by our narrator who, like Joe, is
wondering where the next paycheck will
come from to pay for all his Hollywood
trappings: the mansion, the swimming pool
and the trophy wife, Liz Saxon (Liz
Renay).
We
then switch away to another denizen of Los
Angeles: Dennis Keskidan (Atlas
King). He's an ordinary Joe,
with and ordinary wife, ordinary kids, and
ordinary job. Yes, Mr. Keskidan is just
trying to live the American dream -- until
he makes the fatal mistake of taking pity
on a hitchhiker and stops to give him a
lift. The
hitchhiker in question is Mad Dog Click (Cash
Flagg a/k/a you know who), who
commandeers Keskidan's car -- after giving
Keskidan a lethal dose of lead poisoning
with a Luger injector.
And
just in case we weren't sure if Click was
a sociopath, he picks up a hooker (Erina
Enya), and things seems normal
enough until they get back to her
apartment. Swashed in the blinking neon
glow of the signs outside, things turn
sinister when Click starts smacking her
around with no provocation, and then ends
the evening by stabbing her, repeatedly,
with a handy pair of scissors.
Back
in LA-LA land, after a wild night of
hosting a party they couldn't afford for
several (real life) one lung
producers -- including Arch Hall Sr. and
George Morgan (and how they're
going to get that motorcycle out of the
pool is beyond me) -- Liz has had
enough of life with Joe. They're all
washed up, so she leaves him a goodbye
note and sneaks off while he sleeps. Of
course, she misses the radio report that
three more lunatics have escaped from
prison and are believed to be loose in the
area.
Two
more characters enter the fray: a couple
of young lovebirds (Ron
Burr and Carolyn Brandt) want to
take the tour of their soon to be new
home; a real fixer-upper. They were
supposed to meet the old owner there that
afternoon, but he's nowhere to be found.
Since the
house is unlocked,
they head inside. There's signs that the
owner is home
-- the record
player is going, food on the table -- but
he doesn't answer
their calls.
Moving on to the guest house, they find it
in worse shape than
the main house. Still no answer from the
owner as they head upstairs,
where the couple finds out why when they
come face to face with the owner's
dismembered head.
 T'was
the
three escaped criminals who killed him
while trying to hide
out
until dark. Keith (Keith O'Brien),
the one with the bloody axe, kicks the
head down the steps after the fleeing
couple. Herbie (Herb Robins -- who
we haven't seen since The
Worm Eaters), the
one with the gun, tackles the man and
holds him down while the woman cowers in
the corner. The
third, and most dangerous, man, Gary (Gary
Kent), promptly goes berserk
because they just happened to shut the
door on him. Thinking he's locked in again,
this triggers a psychotic episode in Gary
that quickly turns homicidal. As the man
tries to defend his wife, he gets his
head, pretty graphically, lopped off by an
out of control Gary. (Okay,
a dummy, pretty graphically, gets its head
lopped off by Gary.) And he's so
blindly out of control that he goes after
Herbie next, allowing the girl to escape.
She
doesn't get much of head start as the
other two crooks get Gary calmed down
enough to give chase. Taunting their
victim as they go, they drag the
cat-n-mouse out for a while until she
flees back into the house and up the
stairs where she quickly runs out of real
estate, and then Keith, not quite as
graphically, buries his axe into her chest.
Meanwhile,
Joe, with producer Morgan in tow, and a
reminder on the plot-specific radio that
the three killers are still at large,
track down Liz at her sister Linda's
roadside cafe. Wanting Liz back, Joe's got
another job offer from Morgan, and they're
out scouting locations. Morgan even thinks
the cafe would be a perfect for his next
picture -- but I think the dirty old fart
is really just smitten with Linda (Laura
Benedict).
And
I bet you'll never guess who happens to
stop by the cafe for a beer after a hard
day of chopping people to pieces? Yup, our
three amigos: Herbie, Gary and Keith. Although
I think the bloody axe Keith is carrying
around is a dead giveaway, our
protagonists wonder quietly if these three
are the escaped lunatics. Needing to use
the telephone, Herbie helps himself to
some change from the register and calls
his brother, who is none other than Mad
Dog Click, to come and get him. He's had
enough of the other two, especially Gary,
and plans to ditch them. Keith,
meanwhile, discovers Joe's picture on the
wall among several other movie stars and
posters (of Steckler's other films).
Herbie ain't all that impressed and
decides to have a little fun with the
movie-star -- they're going to make their
own little movie right on the spot. He
makes Joe stand up on the table, sets the
scene, and when he, the director, calls
"action", the actor will be shot
-- with a pistol, not a camera.
Fast
on her feet, Linda manages to sneak some
rat poison into Herbie's coffee. Herbie
milks the scene, torturing his actor, and
offers Joe the coffee as a last meal, but,
luckily, Joe refuses. Herbie then takes a
long swig, and then the fastest damned
acting rat poison ever recorded on film
instantaneously kills him before he can
finish his next sentence. Hell,
before he could even get any backwash into
the mug. During the mad scramble for
Herbie's gun, Liz flees
outside with Gary right behind her.
Inside, Joe and Morgan manage to overpower
Keith and get the gun. Leaving Morgan and
Linda to hold Keith with the gun, Joe goes
after Liz and the extended chase scene is
on:
Liz
runs. And screams. Gary chases her. Joe
chases after them. Liz runs some more. And
screams some more. Gary chases her some
more. And Joe chases them some more. And a
quick check of the time elapsed on the
film shows only about 45-minutes -- you're
standard Steckler opus usually runs about
72-minutes -- tells us this is gonna go on
for awhile, so let's skip ahead a bit...
Eventually,
Gary traps Liz on top of a cliff. (How
they got up there? I don't know.)
But Joe finally catches up and tackles
Gary. They fight, with the famed Shatner
technique, while Liz flees, screaming the
whole way, back down the hill. The --
well, I'd hate to call it a fight ends
with Joe tossing a Gary shaped dummy over
the cliff. And
another check of the time says we're still
about fifteen minutes short.
Uh-oh.
Liz
flags down a car -- a car that used to
belong to Dennis Keskidan, but is
currently in use by <dramatic music
sting> DAHN-DAHN-DAHN! <end dramatic
music sting> Mad Dog Click, who forces
her to get in. Joe
sees this, but misses the forcing part,
and heads back to the cafe where the
authorities are hauling Keith away. Joe is
surprised that Liz isn't back yet and asks
if the car he saw stopped. An officer
overhears the car's description and links
it to the Keskidan homicide, meaning it
must be the other homicidal maniac
that's been running loose. Wow. What
are the odds?
As
a police dragnet is thrown out over the
area, Click runs into a roadblock and has
to ditch the car. He drags Liz up into the
hills and -- here we go again -- she
screams.
The police give chase. He drags Liz
further into the hills. She's still
screaming. The police give chase. He drags
her further into the hills. She screams
and CLOCKS HIM IN THE NOSE! (Surprised
ya, didn't I.) Liz gets away, and
Click flees from the police, still in hot
pursuit. And we're
still about ten minutes short, so Click
shoots a convenient cowboy and steals his
horse. But the police pursuit continues,
and continues, and continues...until the
film reaches the magical 70 minute mark
and Click is finally caught and shot dead.
Then
the film wraps-up with Joe and Liz back
home, reconciled and ready to give up the
Hollywood life and move on to other
things, together. That is, until Morgan
calls and offers him a part in a movie
he's making about the horrible ordeal
they've just been through. But, hey, at
$5000 a week, three months guaranteed, I'm
sure we'd all be willing to relive a
little trauma.
The
End
Well,
what can I tell you about Ray Dennis
Steckler that you probably don't know
already. You probably already knew that he
has more aliases than any other actor or
director that I can think of. (And
all his films each have about a dozen
different titles as well.) You
probably already knew the notorious
reputations of his films based on their
dubious titles like The
Incredibly Strange Creatures That Stopped
Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies,
The
Hollywood Strangler meets the Skid Row
Slasher
and Rat
Pfink a Boo Boo.
What
I can tell you is that Creatures
began life as Face of Evil, which
then became The Incredibly Strange
Creatures: Or Why I Stopped Living and
Became a Mixed Up Zombie until
Columbia sued on behalf of Stanley
Kubrick's Dr.
Strangelove;
and the rest is history. And you probably
already knew that his wife, Carolyn
Brandt, starred in most of his films, and
how she usually wound up meeting a violent
end.
I
honestly don't have a whole lot to add.
It's
unfortunate that Steckler's reputation as
a bad movie director is based mostly on
his film's titles. When the Medved's put Rat
Pfink in their Golden
Turkey
book they hadn't even seen it. (Upon
viewing it later, they reversed course and
championed it.) I won't go so far
as to say Steckler is a great director,
but the man has some talent that shows up
in his film -- and those moments stick
out, starkly, amongst all the crap. Two
such scenes stand out in The
Thrill Killers:
The noirish sequence where Click kills the
prostitute; framed in the strobing and
pulsing neon light, it would have made
Siodmak proud. The second is the stalk and
chase of Brandt through the abandoned
house. Steckler builds that scene up so
well, and it absolutely refuses to spin
out of control, defying the film's
momentum.
Steckler's
biggest problem is that his films, as a
whole, lack a certain cohesion. All the
subplots don't fit together very well and
you get a sense that they're making it all
up as they go. That's because, usually,
they were. His films were heavy on
improvisation from his actors and the
whims of the director. The entire sequence
where the couple first meets the killers
only came about because Steckler spotted
the abandoned house while scouting other
locations. And the character of Click was
added because Steckler realized, halfway
through filming, that he didn't have
enough material with the other three
killers to reach the magical 72-minute
mark. And
that leads us to the fatal flaw in all of
Steckler's films. Oy! Oy! OY! are these
things padded out with repetitive or
irrelevant sequences that go on --
seemingly, forever. If you thought Jerry's
final sprint into the ocean in Creatures
went on forever, you ain't seen nothing
yet. The first half of the chase was bad
enough, but I'm pretty sure Steckler used
every frame of footage of him on that
horse covering every square inch of
Topanga Canyon.
An
interesting side note on the horse and
cowboy was that they were both borrowed
from the nearby Spahn Ranch. You know,
where Charlie Manson and his brood hung
out.
The
film is populated almost completely with
Steckler's stock players: Brandt, King,
Titus Moede and The Brick. Herb Robins was
Steckler's acting coach and a veteran of
many a Ted V. Mikels movie. Robins was a
method-man to a fault and never said the
same line the same way twice -- so
Steckler usually just turned him loose.
The one newcomer here was Liz Renay. She
had just gotten out of prison the day
before shooting commenced. Renay had been
Mickey Cohen's mol, and when the notorious
LA gangster got busted, she refused to
testify against him and spent the next
three years at Terminal Island. (Not
quite as big a scandal that befell Cohen's
hired muscle, Tony Stompanato, who was
killed by Lana Turner's daughter.)
One
of the things that gets overlooked the
most about Steckler is how big of a
showman he was. He would tour with his
films, setting up shows and incorporating
all kinds of gimmicks for the screenings.
Most popular was interrupting the movie
and sending out costumed individuals,
dressed like the monsters on screen, to
run amok in the audience at strategic
points during the film.
The
Thrill Killers
was no different. Ballyhooed as the first
horror movie filmed in Hallucinogenic
HYPNO-VISION! the film was preceded by an
introduction by The Amazing Ormond,
America's "premier hypnotist",
who would use a swirling red spiral on the
screen to hypnotize the audience to help
"enhance" their viewing
experience. He also warned that at certain
points during the movie, the red spiral
would appear, meaning the killer was now
sitting among you. Of course, there would
be a planted member of the audience
dressed like Click. Mayhem and flying
popcorn usually ensued.
Shriek
Show's DVD includes Ormond's introduction
as a bonus feature on their recently
released disc. There's also a ton of
promotional material, an interview with
Steckler, and a commentary that proves
what an amiable kind of guy Steckler
really is.
Seriously,
I've always been a fan of Steckler and try
to defend him whenever I can. (When
I was in Las Vegas a couple of years ago,
I checked the phonebook in the hotel and
found a listing for R Steckler but was too
chicken to call him.) His films are
a far cry from good, let alone great, but
are no where near as bad as their
reputations. His films have an organic
surrealism to them that I can't quite
quantify, but I likes 'em. Sue me. If you
could just distill his movies down to the
bare essentials, and cut out the fat, I
think you can honestly appreciate the
man's talent behind the camera -- if not
the wonky weirdness of his art.
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