Tonight’s movie is definitely a contender for longest title ever. It’s also one of the more misleading titles I’ve seen. The initial creatures aren’t exactly incredibly strange. In fact, they’re your general, run-of-the-mill beatniks and bums. We have Jerry, played by “Cash Flagg” (actually auteur Ray Dennis Steckler), his buddy Harold, played by “Atlas King” (actually some immigrant guy whose name is most likely not “Atlas King”), Jerry’s girlfriend, and some carnie sideshow losers. And then, at the end, they don’t really turn into zombies, mixed-up or otherwise. They don’t really even die. They just have acid splashed in their faces by a really hideous gypsy woman.
Jerry and company attend a carnival where Madame Estrella tells fortunes and her sister Carmelita dances. Carmelita seduces Jerry into the clutches of Estrella, who hypnotizes “feelthy peegs” with her spinning hypno-thing. She uses hypno-Jerry to kill off other members of the carnie circuit who she has feuds with. Meanwhile, Jerry turns into an abusive, listless bum (not really any different from the way he was before), estranging all his friends from him. He’s plagued by weird, performance-art dreams. Finally, when Madame Estrella has no more use for Jerry, she throws acid in his face and sticks him in a cage with the rest of her acid-scarred ex-hypno-bums. They break out and enjoy a brief rampage through the carnival before being gunned down by the police, and Jerry runs off a cliff into the ocean and dies.
This is, at its heart, a very stupid movie. It’s boring and totally inept. It tries for atmosphere, and fails. It tries to have an important message, and fails. It tries to be frightening, and…you see where this is going, I think. So instead of rehashing all the jokes from the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” episode where Incredibly Strange Creatures was basted and beautifully roasted like the turkey it is, I’m going to take a slightly different tack. Modern literature.
At the time I read “Steppenwolf” in a modern lit class in college (pretentious crap galore, don’t get me started on fucking Dadaism), when nearly everyone else in the class was trying to sound smart and praising the novel’s complexities and ingenious understanding of the human condition or some stupid bullshit to make themselves sound smart, I couldn’t help thinking, “Didn’t’ I just see this movie on MST3K last weekend”?
Steckler, whether consciously or not, took a great deal of influence, almost to the point of plagiarism, from Herman Hesse and his atrociously crappy proto-beatnik novel “Steppenwolf”. Hesse’s main character (I forget his name, because I read the book my second year of college, almost four years ago now) and Jerry are cut from the same cloth. Loners, misunderstood by society (although at least Jerry has the unintelligible Harold for company of dubious sexual orientation), they turn to the taboo and their inner thoughts for sanctuary. The dream-sequences of Hesse’s novel are nearly identical to the freak-out performance-art nightmares Jerry has once under Estrella’s spell (note from the editor: click on that little rolling head guy at the bottom to see an example of this). Of course, there are no acid-hurling gypsy hags in “Steppenwolf” that I can remember, but it probably would have benefited from a few.
I had originally intended that bit to be a little more in-depth, but I just now realized that it’s been over four years since I read that crappy novel, and my only remaining impression of it is that it’s pretty much identical to this movie. All those fucking Nietzsche-spouting dickweeds at your local Starbucks would have a fucking fit if they knew that the novel that changed their lives was turned into a crappy horror-flick and ragged on by The Brains. God dammit, now I’m all pissed off about ass-wipe pseudo-intellectuals who think Jackson Pollack and Ayn Rand are talented artists. Fuckin’ goddamn hippies! Bah!
If you’re ever in Las Vegas, look up Ray Steckler at his movie shop and pop in for a visit. Just don’t bring up “MST3K”.
The Moral of the Story: Looking like Nicholas Cage’s mongoloid brother is not going to make you a movie star. Ripping off crappy German authors is not going to make you a famous filmmaker. Speaking favorably of lame post-industrial philosophy written by a bunch of drug-addled proto-hippie douche bags is going to drastically increase your chances of being punched in the head by a temperamental b-movie reviewer.
DVD Xtras: Of course, there are some reasons to pick up the ISCWSLABMUZ DVD. The interview segment and commentary with Steckler are interesting looks into the mind of a b-movie maker. Knowing how much work went into the flick, and what an honestly nice guy Steckler is, make the pill a bit easier to swallow. And then there’s the commentary track by my personal hero, Joe Bob Briggs, which is both fucking hilarious and informative. For instance, Atlas King was apparently new to the U.S., and the first person he met was Steckler. Atlas knew little to no English at the time, so Steckler taught him his lines phonetically. Whether or not the dialogue is crap is immaterial when you consider that King recited every line simply by remembering how it sounded, having no clue what he was actually saying. This also probably resulted in King being considerably less embarrassed by the movie than the rest of the cast were.
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