A Ray of Hope

Who the hell was Ray Dennis Steckler?

He was the cat that never copped out when there was danger all about. Yeah, he was one bad muther...shut my mouth! He was the gimp, the goon, the shame-filled brother, the hapless geisha and the pull- apart voodoo Kenny who dared posed nude with the Frisky Kitten Revue! He was the Unburnt King of the B Movies, the 8mm, and of the wiggle-jiggle go-go brigade, Bongo Drum Rum God of the Great Freaky Tiki BeBop A Lula, Breaker of A-frames and lover of hooded sweatshirts. He was Sven Christian, Sven Hellstrom, Cash Flagg, Harry Nixon, Michael J. Rogers, Wolfgang Schmidt, Cindy Lou Steckler and Cindy Lou Sutters.

He damn near killed Alfred Hitchcock, trespassed on Harpo Marx's backyard and won an argument with Stanley Kubrick. But he also gave a job to a homeless, drunken Coleman Francis when no one else would.

Twenty years before MTV was even a legit Thing, he was directing music videos for Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Nazz, Frank Zappa and - most famously - a little song called White Rabbit by a band known as The Jefferson Airplane.

Ten years before The Rocky Horror Picture Show exploded all over the midnight movie circuit like a big, juicy cock blowing its load in a dirty little booth, he directed, wrote and starred in a film called The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies, aka Diabolical Dr. Voodoo, aka Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary. The camera operators on this film were two virtual unknowns named László Kovács and Vilmos Zsigmond.

After that film was released (and quickly forgotten), Steckler popped out another film called The Thrill Killers starring a sexpot honeybomb named Liz Renay, who would go on to star in John Waters' Desperate Living as Muffy St. Jacques. I was about to tell you all about the time she spent three years in prison for refusing to rat out her mobster boyfriend, and the fact that she was the "Mother" half of the first ever Mother/Daughter strip show, but this article is about Ray Dennis Steckler. Lizzie needs her own damn article. Later.

Ray Dennis Steckler made forty films during his career. Yeah, so, half of them were porno flicks, so what? A lot of them were really dirty, gritty, grimy, nasty, seedy, sticky seventies porno films starring tasty young bunnies!

In 1997, a by-then nearly forgotten Ray Dennis Steckler was suddenly shoved back into the spotlight when his monster musical The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies, aka Diabolical Dr. Voodoo, aka Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary popped up on cult television show Mystery Science Theater 3000 and became a huge hit, even inspiring the MST3k gang to permanently install one of Steckler's characters (a horribly filthy, scabby, chainsmoking troll named Ortega who looks like the half aborted result of a one night stand between a drunken Peter Falk and a really moldy potato) into their own cast of B-movie creeps.

In the early 2000's, Ray Dennis Steckler was a hefty, bespectacled, jovial man sitting behind a folding table at a northern California movie theater, signing autographs and giving me a look of utter gobsmackedness when he asked me if I'd ever seen his 1966 hilarious superhero spoof Rat Pfink A Boo Boo and I told him yes, that I did in fact own a copy. He signed a clamshell VHS copy of Thrill Killers and a Spanish movie posters for The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies, aka Diabolical Dr. Voodoo, aka Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary, and then came around the table, handheld movie camera in hand, aimed right at me and my friends, laughing and joking and always and forever filming, filming, filming. He called me "dear" and thanked me for being a fan and I got to tell him that I loved him.  No, not in that way, you pervy jerkoffs. I respected him. He was an indie filmmaker in a time when Indie wasn't even a real word.

Just a few years later he was gone. He left the shimmering desert of Las Vegas behind forever and joined that big, sticky, slightly grubby video rental store in the sky. I cried for three days.

Ray Dennis Steckler is often lumped in with Ed Wood and Coleman Francis as one of the all-time worst film directors of all time. I've seen all of Francis's and Wood's films; they were monochrome, flat and staler than a two week old slice of burnt toast. Ray's films were colorful, even when they were black and white. They pulsed with frantic energy and sparkled with electric enthusiasm. They were superfun and extra jiggly, lipstick smeared and soapy bubbled, rockabilly beach dancing, circus ponies on rollerskates crazy. Fuck the plots, or the lack of one as the case may be, just watch it all unfold in its reel-skippy, cigarette burn flashy, badly deteriorated & shitty tinted slices of celluloid glory and know that you are not watching a film per se, but a lifelong love affair as tawdry and bawdy as any backroom bouncy wiggle in a kiddie pool full of coconut oil and glitter can possibly be.

This isn't a belated obituary. This is just a long overdue love letter to the filmmaker who introduced me to the wonderful underground world of guerilla grindhouse. I am forever grateful. And I am forever a fan.