The strange directing career of Ray Dennis Steckler got under way with this a terrible comedy musical, Wild Guitar, in 1962 written and produced by Arch Hall Sr and starring his son Arch Jr. Next up was this incomprehensibly titled oddity, made for a paltry $38,000, again for Hall Sr’s Fairway Pictures. Steckler had made an amateur 8mm film in his youth and his love of film translated into a career in camera work (he was an uncredited camera assistant on Hall Sr’s Eegah (1962)) jeopardised when he allegedly knocked over an A frame and narrowly avoided injuring Alfred Hitchcock.

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (a title so ludicrous and unwieldy that it ended up with shorter ones, including Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary, which turns out to be just as meaningless) originally had a young black man in the role of the killer until Hall Sr got cold feet about alienating potential audiences and told Steckler to change it. Steckler’s response was to take on the role himself and thus was born his acting alter ego, Cash Flagg who, it turns out, sometimes has a passing resemblance to Nicolas Cage on a calmer day (if indeed Cage has such moments).

“Flagg” plays Jerry who sets off to the carnival with his girlfriend Angela (Sharon Walsh, a last-minute replacement for Bonita Jade who was fired for leaving the set to see her boyfriend’s band play a gig) and best friend Harold (Atlas King). While they wander around the midway for a while (partly shot at The Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California, partly on sets built at a cavernous former Masonic temple in Glendale, California, formerly the property of Hollywood star Rock Hudson), alcoholic exotic dancer Marge (Steckler’s then wife Carolyn Brandt) is startled is by a black cat and visits fortune-teller Estrella (Brett O’Hara) for advice. Estrella predicts death for Marge and flees, just as Jerry, Angela, and Harold arrive and are told that someone close to Angela will soon die near water. Jerry is enticed by Estrella’s sister Carmelita (Erina Enyo), a stripper who hypnotizes him and Estrella turns him into a mindless killer. Becoming possibly cinema’s first hoodie killer, Jerry goes on a rampage he has no memory of, Estrella is revealed to have a menagerie of zombie-like men whose faces she’s disfigured with acid and we get to suffer through far too many interminable song and dance numbers.

Steckler’s directorial “style” (such that it was) was always rather detached and distant, like he really wanted nothing more than to make films and greatly enjoyed being on sets around actors and crew members but didn’t really have quite as much interest in the actual process of directing. He tends to just leave his cameras where they are and let his cast get on with it, though on this occasion should have helped to make things look better than they otherwise might. Advertised as having been shot in the bogus “Hallucinogenic Hypnovision” process, The Incredibly Strange Creatures featured among its crew two young future cinematographers looking for their big break who would later go on to far better things – the camera operator was William (Vilmos) Zsigmond (Deliverance (1972), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), The Deer Hunter (1978) et al) and his assistant was Leslie (Laszlo) Kovacs (Easy Rider (1969), Shampoo  (1975), Ghostbusters (1984) et al). So the film looks marginally better than anything Steckler would subsequently make but not by much.

There’s very little of the style here that would make them two of the most in demand directors of photography in Hollywood and Joseph V. Mascelli’s actual photography is still drab and uninspiring. Elsewhere, the wart on Estrella’s face seems to move around from one short to the next (O’Hara, usually employed as Susan Hayward’s stand-in, appears to be wearing blackface though the lighting is far from flattering so it’s hard to be certain) and the make-up by Brandt flatters no-one, including herself. One might suggest that Steckler and co were still finding their cinematic feet here, still learning the ropes and that they should be cut some slack. But Steckler never got any better than this (it might just be his best film) and when one compares it to some of the professional feature films made by first time directors (Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971), John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974), Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) and many others) there’s really no explanation for how this turned out other than an innate lack of talent.

One has to wonder how many kids (what else could the target audience have been for this nonsense?) would have sat still for the dull cabaret dance scenes (of which there are a few) and poorly recorded rock and roll songs (of which there are far too many). It’s the sort of film that makes you wonder if we weren’t genetically designed to have opposable thumbs simply to allow us to zoom past these awful diversions. And yet the film made money for Steckler, if not necessarily for Hall Sr. He put it out ats the bottom half of double bills until Steckler was able to take back control and paired it up with Coleman Francis’ The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961), renamed it a few times (it also played as Diabolical Dr Voodoo) and road-showed it around the States where he would pop up in the audience wearing a monster mask to startle the punters. It worked and it made Steckler good money, encouraging him to embark on a career making increasingly odd films like The Thriller Killers (1964), Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1965), Sinthia, the Devil’s Doll (1968), The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire (1971), The Horny Vampire (1971), Blood Shack (1971), The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher (1979) among far too many others. Throughout his career, concepts like interesting camera angles, dramatic editing and atmospheric lighting remained stubbornly alien to him.