9th November 2007: Steckler, Buchanan, Hall Jr #1!

Friday 9^th November 2007: B-KINGS TRIPLE #1 – Steckler, Buchanan, Hall Jr!

Tonight we pay tribute to three unique talents in the history of B filmmaking – wildly inconsistent, fuelled on the smell of an oily rag, and completely out of their trees. Three visionaries in their own way, three Schlock Kings who bring us gifts of gold teeth, Frankenstein and meh.

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed Up Zombies

First is Ray Dennis Steckler, a true original American DIY auteur whose eccentric takes on pulp culture and almost expressionistic editing look and feel like the films of the Kuchar Brothers but sillier and without the self-conscious artiness. Free-form to the point of experimental, his movies Rat Pfink A Boo Boo and The Lemon Grove Kids Meet The Monsters are a triumph of determination and imagination over a complete absence of budget. There’s no denying Steckler’s charm; you just need a special kind of eyes to appreciate his innate genius.

So to The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed Up Zombies, Steckler’s second film after 1962’s Wild Guitar for Arch Hall Senior and Junior. It’s billed as the world’s first Teen Monster Musical, and I’m certainly not going to argue the point. Set in a carnival that by 1963 was already looking like a more seedy version of Nightmare Alley, we meet the boozy Marge Nielsen (Steckler’s then-wife and favourite muse Carolyn Brandt), a lush whose endless tangos with the bottle are putting her dancing career on the skids. She crosses palms with Estrella, the carnival’s resident fortune teller with an accent that would make Bela Lugosi blanche and with a wart the size of Romania, but the prognosis isn’t good.

It’s then “teens go wild”, in one of the film’s many schizophrenic leaps in internal logic. Meet Jerry and his mate, a pair of cheerful would-be delinquents who look suspiciously like Nicolas Cage’s old man and Sean Penn Senior, as they pick up Angie, a good girl with a yen for adventures with bad boys. Jerry – played by Steckler as his on-screen alter ego “Cash Flagg”, who obviously fancied himself as a receding Jimmy Dean - ditches his girl to watch the bump-and-grind routine of the exotic gypsy dancer Carmelita, who just happens to be the gypsy crone’s sister. Between the two and their grotesque chain-smoking henchman (an unspecified rubber-faced stereotype that Goebels would have been proud of), they hypnotize Jerry with a crazy hypno-wheel.

We’re never quite sure if Estrella the gypsy hates all men, or just the ones with penises. Whatever the reason, Jerry is now one of her back-room collection of hypnotized “zombies”, hideous acid-scarred creatures (and I’m not talking about hippies here): hood up, eyes bulging, and going hammer and tongs at Carolyn Brandt with a knife. Fading in and out of the hypnotic state, he’s haunted by visions of a bloodied Carolyn and, in the film’s most perfectly realized scene, has an extended hallucination – it’s Salvador Dali’s dream sequence from Spellbound, but with ballerinas, go-go dancers and gorillas.

Words can’t describe the experience of The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies, and its twisted variety format crossed with old-fashioned spookshow, only with real-life Muppets. At times dreamlike and hyper-real, with stunningly garish colour photography by Vilmos Szigmond, the film’s weirdness is heightened by a seemingly endless parade of musical numbers, all filmed over one day on the same threadbare set until the dancers were on the point of collapse. The Rockettes they ain’t, but the costumes are fantastic. You’re left with the impression it’s a scriptless Bollywood production where most of the meager budget’s been spent on papadums and silly putty.

Roll back to 1963 when The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies first opened – during the Freaks-inspired ending, hooded “zombies” would run through the crowd in rubber masks holding rubber knives, and scare the living Bejeebers out of an already-befuddled audience. I wish I could be in your house now, but like Santa Claus, there’s a lot of children to visit. So, just imagine I’m coming up behind you as we let loose The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies.

The Eye Creatures

Now to Larry Buchanan, a self-described guerilla filmmaker based for a good deal of time in Dallas, Texas, who is notorious for his Z-grade clunkers made on the fly between pretentious art films like the deliberately Bergman-esque Strawberries Need Rain. This from the director of Mistress Of The Apes and Mars Needs Women, who claims to have hung out with Lee Harvey Oswald? There’s definitely more going on under the surface – unfortunately they truly ARE under the surface, as Larry took many of his secrets to the grave in 2004. If only there’s a way of digging him and squeezing it out of him….

The phenomenal success (relatively speaking) of Buchanan’s 1963 picture Free White And 21 led his distributor American International Pictures to approach him on a suicide mission. With the lucrative world of late night TV starting to pay off, Buchanan was commissioned by AIP to deliver eight remakes of their classic 50s science fiction titles, all to be shot back to back on 16mm with budgets of less than $30,000 each, then sold as part of a TV package. Less than $30,000? That’s barely more than most porn budgets. And, like most cheap-assed companies, they wanted them yesterday.

So began Buchanan’s mad rush over the next eighteen months that would yield his Z-grade octet known as the “Azalea” pictures, after his production company. First came The Eye Creatures, a deliberately old-fashioned quickie, modeled on AIP’s 1957 teen schlocker Invasion Of The Saucer Men. A good chunk of the small pile of change was spent on “name” star John Ashley, the B-Elvis from 50s juvie classics as Motorcycle Gang, Drag Strip Girl and High School Caesar. Ashley, ever the trooper, took time off between his Beach Party films and jungle adventures in the Philippines to head a no-name, not to mention unpaid, cast of misfits, aging teens, and would-be comedians in an almost Quixotic fight against time and money – not to mention aliens in sneakers and body stockings.

The Air Force is sent into a typical backwoods town to investigate a possible UFO landing. Ah, Small Town USA - where all the kids ever do is make out, while being spied on by a pair of chucklehead Radar operators. Hip to the saucer landing (footage stolen from the 1953 Invaders From Mars) is a pair of con-artists looking to make a quick buck from showing a dead alien on ice, as well as John Ashley (playing Stan) and fiancée Susan Rogers, who plan to elope as her father, a respectable lawyer, doesn’t approve of Stan. Maybe that’s because Ashley, at 31, is the town’s oldest teenage delinquent?

In their haste for a quick honeymoon, Stan and Susan run over a “thing” – a weird shapeless blob who wrecks their car, forcing them to Old Man Bailey’s house in the middle of the woods. Bailey’s a suspicious old coot who doesn’t like people, and has declared war on smoochers who use his property for their all-night gropefests. And it’s just as well – these ham-fisted, hormone-driven teenyboppers might actually save the world.

Naturally the cops think the kids are hopped up on goofballs or on the moonshine, so when one of the conmen turns up dead, Stan and Susan are blamed. Despite the Official Denial from the Air Force, Stan knows better, and claims the aliens framed him by bending his fender. Now THAT’s paranoia for you! The kids escape from custody in a stolen police car… unbeknownst to them their passenger is a disembodied claw!

And here’s your full lineup of effects: one hubcap flying saucer, one claw, and a trio of bubble suits that look like clusters of Rice Crispies over a huge gaping mouth (or is it an open sore?). No “eyes” stand out, but I guess The Mouth Creatures would be the kiss of death on late night Channel 31 (is anyone still watching?). The whole film’s eighty minutes takes place in one night, though you’d never tell – Buchanan’s day-for-night photography, which looks like midday at the equator, is unconvincingly spliced between night-time studio shots.

The Eye Creatures is riddled with government cover-ups and alien conspiracies, of which Buchanan was a firm believer, although he never labeled himself a conspiracy theorist. Talk about being in the right spot at the wrong time: Buchanan was inadvertently caught up in the JFK assassination, having shot part of his 1963 film Naughty Dallas at Jack Ruby’s nightclub, and his acquaintanceship with JFK’s supposed assassin led him to film the fictitious Trial Of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1964. All he would say about Dallas: “All kinds of weird things happened down there.” A much later film, Down On Us/Beyond The Doors, focuses on a CIA plot to assassinate Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison – all of which, Buchanan claimed, is based on fact, of which he had proof.

If the aliens ARE real, I’m sure they’re watching right now, assuming the Channel 31 transmitter can make it past Clayfield, tucking into a bowl of Rice Crispies and having a good old laugh at us Stoopid Humans, as we run around in circles trying to make sense of Larry Buchanan’s non-fictional The Eye Creatures.

The Choppers

We’ve played most of the collected works of Arch Hall Junior and Senior recently on Schlock Treatment – now to their first film The Choppers, a juvenile delinquent (or JD) tale filmed in 1959 when Arch Hall Jr was just sixteen, but not released until 1961. It a tale of “Youth Gone Wild”, one of a whole slew of offensively preachy tomes: a plea for parents to watch their kids, make them stay in school, and just one step from blaming comic books or lack of prayer. Instead the message is this: Broken homes lead to broken lives, and the spawn of overly indulgent or alcoholic bums for parents have an insatiable craving for attention, cheap thrills or worse.

The Choppers is not a biker film as the title would suggest, but about a gang of car-part thieves or “Choppers”, five boys aged sixteen to eighteen, and just like the bikers the JD films would step aside for, the kids have cute names like “Torch”, “Snooper” and “Cowboy”. They’re strippers – not that kind of stripper, but they can strip the cars of unsuspecting motorists, referred to as “Square Johns”, in less time than it takes to peel off your Reg Grundies. Young Arch is their unofficial leader Jack “Cruiser” Bryan, the scariest kind of delinquent of all – a thinking delinquent. He’s also cold, sociopathic, and spouts lines of beat jive like “Peel off those cabbage leaves!” written by the squares he claims to despise.

The cops have no clues, nothin’, not even at the chop shop they sell the parts to, run by the crusty but tight-lipped Moose played by B-regular Bruno VeSota, who I swear looks like a tall dwarf. Even Tom, an insurance investigator whose girlfriend (Marianne Gabar, Playboy Playmate from September 1959) is over 25 years younger, gets his car stripped while making out and not coming up for air. Naturally the kids get cocky, and plan elaborate heists, even posing as hicks while using a chicken truck as a decoy. And man, dig those crazy walkie talkies that are the size of a child’s coffin! On a down moment, out comes the guitar and bongos, and with the Choppers and truck load of chickens as his only audience, baby-faced Arch, only sixteen, sings the fried would-be beat babble of “Monkey In My Hatband, I can do a handstand…” I could be wrong, but I suspect THIS is the golden Arch moment, the pinnacle of his music career, and the one single moment in The Choppers where his true genius peeks through.

Of course the Choppers can’t sustain their monumental egos; real-life Daddy-O Arch Senior, unmitigated ham that he is, plays famous radio reporter Jim Bradford, who in redefining the term “slow news day”, does a blow-by-blow description in painful detail of the Choppers’ arrest. Remember kids: I understand you have the burning need to urinate on a cop car, maybe set fire to a police station or two. Just wait till you’re older. Meanwhile RESPECT YOUR TEETH AND BRUSH YOUR PARENTS. Both won’t be around forever, so use them while you can. This has been a public announcement brought to you by The Choppers.

23rd November 2007: Steckler, Buchanan, Hall part 2!

23rd November 2007: Steckler, Buchanan, Hall Jr Part 2!

The Thrill Killers

First is Ray Dennis Steckler’s follow-up feature to his 1963 Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies. Taking his cues from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Steckler tries his hand at the horror genre and fashions a no-budget shocker which, from the director of charming fluff like The Lemon Grove Kids Meet The Monsters (1965) and Rat Pfink A Boo Boo (1966), is surprisingly heavy on the shocks. If Steckler’s filmmaking career was running parallel with Arch Hall Sr and Jr’s – and there’s many crossover points, Wild Guitar notwithstanding – this is Steckler’s The Sadist (1963): filmed in stark black and white, grueling, consistently grim and just plain wrong.

However it’s from Steckler’s film universe, so his universal laws apply, right down to the casting of his regular hustlers: Titus Moede as a motorcycle cop, Atlas King, Gary Kent, not to mention Steckler’s then-wife Carolyn Brandt and Steckler himself. The unlikely named “Brick” Bardo (real name Joseph) plays Joe Saxon, perennial loser and would-be actor whose wife, Liz (real-life showgirl, gangster moll and would-be actress Liz Renay) accuses him of not living in the “real world” - wherever the hell THAT may be in Steckler’s bizarro universe. Liz, herself a former actress (the character, I mean), now finds herself bored, restless, and trapped in a mansion that’s starting to look decidedly soiled. Her husband decides to throw a party for some Hollywood phonies – and who should appear but The Thrill Killers’ producers Arch Hall Sr and George J. Morgan, arms around a pair of barely legal party hoppers, playing pie-eyed versions of their real selves. Talk about blurring the lines of reality even further.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Topanga Canyon, Steckler’s alter-ego “Cash Flagg” emerges from behind the camera to play the clearly deranged Mort “Mad Dog” Click, well into a serious killing spree as he shoots a passing motorist (Atlas King) and steals his station wagon. “People are no good!” he proclaims before stabbing a go-go dancer with a pair of scissors. It’s amazing that Steckler resurrected “Cash Flagg” as an afterthought to beef up the film’s running time, as he’s certainly its most memorable part. Surely the sight of Steckler’s iconic crew-cut skull perched on top of a heart of pure evil is up there with his hooded zombie in Incredibly Strange Creatures… as some of the most indelible images from Sixties low-budget Americana.

Back to Liz as drives to a diner run by her beatnik cousin to escape the tedium of her Hollywood hack husband. She narrowly misses regular customers and almost-weds Ron (Ron Burr) and Carol (Steckler’s then-wife Carolyn Brandt) who are checking out their dream house in the Canyon - but don’t get too fond of them, they don’t stick around for long. Also in the house are three escaped patients from a nearby asylum, and one of them - Herb Robins (Herbie), later seen chowing into a jar full of real wrigglers in Ted V. Mikels’ The Worm Eaters (1977) – has an axe. In every other Steckler film the three psychopaths would have been a trio of boobs being a poor man’s version of the Bowery Boys, but not here: the film’s not played for laughs, although there are some dark chuckles if you’re in the right frame of mind.

Three psychos with an axe, a screaming Liz Renay and a frantic Joe Schmoe who desperately wants to be a real-life action hero AND Herb’s brother “Mad Dog” shooting a cowboy and stealing a horse to gallop away from the cops – it all spirals into a mad, twisting game of cat and mouse and a delirious chase along the side of Topanga Canyon. It’s more than a B-film - it’s John Cassavettes with a pulp sensibility, deeply self-referential and filled with personal motifs and visual fetishes. Don’t forget just how good the film looks; there’s real grime in each black and white frame, shot almost entirely in daylight and yet filled with shadows and shades of grey, making it just that more genuinely unnerving.

Weird, intense, and unlike any other film of its time (with the possible exception of The Sadist), we’re proud to present another odd find from the netherworld of Ray Dennis Steckler: the 1964 The Thrill Killers.

Zontar The Thing From Venus

Now to our second film from Texan auteur Larry Buchanan, and second in Larry Buchanan’s monumental effort to make eight films over a two year period for American International Pictures. Like the other TV titles in what would become known as the “Azalea Films” (after Buchanan’s production company), a good chunk of the $25,000 budget would have gone on paying their single “name” actor. For Zontar The Thing From Venus, a rough-as-guts remake of Roger Corman’s cool Cold War paranoia quickie It Conquered The World (1956), Buchanan hired John Agar, a B-identity to be sure, but so memorable in The Brain From Planet Arous (1957). The rest of the cast is filled out by underpaid stock players from Azalea’s repertory company.

Set in a space surveillance station, its limited resources means there’s lots of shots of scientists standing in rooms twiddling knobs and speaking in “Scientese”. Speaking of “Scientese”, our anti-hero Keith Ritchie (Anthony Huston) is full of it – he invites his friend and co-worker Dr Curt Taylor (Agar) and his wife to dinner, only to confide he’s been receiving instructions from a being on Venus with an untranslatable name that roughly sounds like “Zontar”. To prove the point, Keith shows his guests a closet full of transistors making sounds like frying eggs, which he believes is Zontar communicating with him by “hyperspace hypnotism”. As far as Curt can see, his friend looks like a madman yelling at his radio, but then one of Earth’s satellites are sabotaged and goes missing. Could it be Zontar’s on the way? And could his true mission on Earth be… to take over the World?

Soon it’s like a shoestring Apocalypse - cars won’t start, taps won’t turn on, everything is “de-energized” leading to panic on the streets (or one street at least). Keith becomes drunk with power, arrogantly believing Zontar is the world’s saviour, and he’s got a front row seat to witness mankind’s transformation. This is what happens to the nerdy kid at school who’s made fun of for being a brainiac – your only friend is a fascist from Venus who holes himself up in an underground cavern for most of the film’s eighty minutes. At first, all we see of Zontar are weird flying creatures called “injectapods” – a cross between an owl and a bat, secreting a controlling device on the back of their victims’ necks. Keith’s wife finally has enough of her husband’s Goebbels trip and confronts Zontar face to face. And what a face! Zontar’s brief appearance can only be described as a three-eyed turd with wings. And that’s being kind.

Zontar The Thing From Venus is a low-brow cheapie – in fact, it’s about as low as it can go – and yet it sets its sights high. It’s a comment on fascism, communism, cultism or occultism, you name the “ism” and its dehumanizing effects, and much more. According to Keith’s early monologue, alien intelligence is watching us pathetic Earthlings to protect us from ourselves, as we’re not advanced enough to join the Planetary Federation. It’s a weatherbeaten idea that’s trotted out in UFO conspiracy and New Age circles to this day, and it still sounds like a cheap paperback plot device. When will these New Agers learn? I give you pathetic Earthlings another Z-grade effort from the king of paperback conspiracy films – that’s Z for Zontar The Thing From Venus

Deadwood '76

And now to the final of our three films tonight, and the last of six films in our Arch Hall Junior season. Arch-baby, the awkward matinee pseudo-idol manufactured by his dear old dad Arch Hall Senior, never really had his heart in his work and just wanted to be a pilot, which is what he does to this day. What he did leave was a strange filmic legacy via his father’s company Fairway Pictures: six features, each a different genre (sci fi, comedy, juvenile delinquent, teen rock movie), and each an odd little duck with their own unique personalities. Deadwood ’76 is Fairway’s western, and you can just tell Arch Hall Sr, former stuntman and bit player, was itchin’ to get back to the Old West. The result is a film that seems twenty years too late: a VERY straight western, and a little preachy at that too. By playing it too straight, it strangles the very essence that makes films like Eegah! and Wild Guitar (both 1962) so enjoyable.

It’s 1876 and the Gold Rush is sending every man and his mule poring into the West since, as the old cliché goes (and God knows, it’s in the script), “there’s gold in them hills”. Arch is out of place as ever, his blonde mane crushed under a Stetson and with a chin that looks like it’s taken a slug from a .45. As Billy May, a young upstart gunfighter, he teams up with Tennessee, a prospector with a wagon load of cats bound for Deadwood, a lawless town run by bad men – and women. The whole town’s waiting on a rumoured showdown between Wild Bill Hickok and Billy The Kid – hell, they’re even betting their pension funds on it. Arch is mistaken for The Kid, and in a flush of youthful arrogance he doesn’t bother to correct them. When the local cathouse owner Fancy and his partner-in-crime, the brassy sassy Poker Kate (Liz Renay hiding behind the “Melissa Morgan” moniker – for tax reasons, I can only surmise), find out the truth, they keep their mouths shut and wait for Wild Bill to bring Billy down.

He and Tenessee go into the mining business but Billy’s captured by “Injuns” and taken to their camp where he sees his paw. His actual paw, as well - Arch Sr as “William Watters”, playing Billy’s father Boone May, a shabby confederate hiding amongst the Sioux, madder than a cut snake that’s been left to fry in the sun. More potbellied and grizzled than ever, Boone is still fighting the civil war and waiting for the Sioux to join him in the uprising against the damned Yankees. An Indian princess named Little Bird, daughter of chief Red Cloud, starts making goo-goo eyes at Billy and wants to come with him, but Billy knows his road is long and winding and paved with thorns. “Yuh jes’ can’t,” he says, and makes her cry. What a boob.

Heading back into town, he finds there’s three men who want him dead: local thug Sam Bass, whose men Billy took down; Wild Bill hisself; and a 15 year old would-be gunslinger who calls himself “The Badlands Kid”, and wants to go down in history as boy who shot Billy - May, the Kid, whoever the hell he is. In fact the whole town is itchin’ for a lynchin’, as we’re reminded by the ever-present “Ballad of Deadwood” which pops up like an unwanted Greek Chorus every five minutes to lament on the action.

“Dead Wood” is an appropriate name – shame it doesn’t go for 76 minutes. At over the hour and a half mark, it’s obvious Arch Sr is trying to get more bang for his buck. With acting as wooden as the hitching posts the horses are tied to, and a script littered with “varmints” and lines like “the only good injun is a dead injun”, and other assorted chestnuts – all that’s missing is a “dagnabbit” – it’s a less-than-memorable career capper for Arch Baby. Still, we’ve had a good run out of Arch, and I feel that we all get some kind of closure from the wild and woolly western antics of Deadwood ’76.