Ray Dennis Steckler, RIP

That's not to say Steckler's films are incredibly good. Parts of them are unbelievably bad, with camera angles out of your dad's home movies, and dreary blue filters in place of actual night lighting, and lead actors scrambling around trying to do double-duty as extras in their own scenes. Famed critic Lester Bangs even wrote an essay in a 1973 issue of Creem, titled "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, or The Day the Airwaves Erupted" in which he holds its namesake film as an example of a movie where standards of decency don't exist: "[This film] will remain as an artifact in years to come to which scholars and seachers for truth can say 'This was trash!'"

But at the best of times, Steckler's films ooze with the thick wit of an early John Waters film and pop with more corn than the sixties Batman TV show. In fact, his 1966 opus Rat Pfink a Boo Boo stars superheroes decked out in ridiculous costumes made of ski-masks, long johns, and towels for capes. When at the beginning of the film, the crime-fighters make an appearance to eat cake and ice cream at what seems like a real, unscripted children's party, a seemingly real, unscripted four-year-old tells Rat Pfink "You can't scare me!" To which Rat Pfink replies, in a voice as heroic as a Gritty Kitty commercial, "Oh, Rat Pfink would never want to scare anyone... except evildoers!" If that's not top-notch improvised camp gold, then Oscar Wilde died in vain.

And let's not forget rock and roll! Once again, Lester Bangs refers to some of Steckler's movie music as "thoroughly mediocre," but time has been more kind to Steckler's vision. Certainly the nineties rockabilly and trash rock explosion owes a big debt to Steckler's music picks, which often consisted of rockabilly-esque boogaloos in a time when the Beatles were knocking that stuff into oblivion. In fact, his directorial debut, Wild Guitar, stars cult favorite and Mystery Science Theater legend Arch Hall, Jr. strummin' on an old guitar and giving us his best Elvis Holly imitation, one not lost on VHS mail-order hipsters in days gone by. A look through the record collection of any thirty-five year old with a Betty Page tattoo will reveal at least some Steckler influence, whether it be the Go-Nuts, the nineties garage super-group who dressed like Steckler's make-shift superheroes, or the instrumental-surf band Los Kogars, named after a monstrous ape named Kogar in Rat Pfink, or Arch Hall Jr.'s band the Archers, released for the first time on CD in 2005.

Steckler fell out of the cult fanzine limelight in the early seventies. He did some film work for psychedelic bands in the late sixties, and filmed porn in the Seventies and Eighties, including such erotic sequels as Debby Does Las Vegas. But when scholars and searchers for truth do look back on his body of work, his surreal mid-sixties mindblowers will surely prove him a hero of improv and elbow-grease. As an anonymous commenter from the UK said on the IMDB comments for Rat Pfink, "The characters and dialogue were nuttier than a squirrel nest... anyone who likes Hollywood's unbelievably dire recent attempts at comedy should watch this, to see what humour is really about."