This is the twelfth in a series of fifteen pieces on “minor” horror films that I’m going to be publishing here throughout October. For more information, please see this post from last year, when I first did this.
The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher (Ray Dennis Steckler, 1979)
The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher is the work of a defeated man. Ray Dennis Steckler, one of postwar American cinema’s great also-rans, is generally remembered today, if he is remembered at all, for the string of odd, campy, very threadbare B-pictures that he directed in the 1960s, including such classics as Rat Pfink a Boo Boo and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?. These films, while not necessarily “good” or even “not boring” by the standards of your average cinema-goer (which are quite different from mine, and probably yours, too, if you’re choosing read about a movie like this, but work with me here), are inept in a charming and unusual enough way that they’ve become minor cult classics, the sort of thing a young cinephile might watch after Plan 9 From Outer Space and Robot Monster but before, say, Monsters Crash the Pajama Party. They’re not innocent pictures, by any means, they’re horny and lowbrow and clearly profit-motivated, but they’re also fun, playful, possessed of a certain joie de vivre – they seem like the work of someone who enjoys making movies and hopes to make bigger ones someday. But that day, of course, never came, because Steckler was not one of the anointed, not a man blessed with great luck, or skill, or talent. He was just a man who made cheap, silly movies that weren’t very successful, and so in the ‘70s he did what a lot of filmmakers who made movies like that did, sometimes by choice but usually by necessity: he started making porn, and not the upscale kind either, but rather abject masturbation aids with titles like Teenage Massage Parlor and Love Life of Hitler’s Nazis, 50-odd minutes of dismal pawing and penetrating in seedy hotel rooms and tacky apartments. There was the infamously well-padded horror picture Blood Shack in 1971, but after that the ‘70s becomes, for Steckler, a decade of nothing but grinding out these “one-day wonders” in total anonymity. It’s the sort of thing that could break any artist’s spirit – and Steckler was not much of an artist to begin with. It is this context, and these experiences, from which The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher emerges.
