Ray Dennis Steckler once told an interviewer he liked to keep a few thousand feet of film stock in the refrigerator just in case he got a good idea for a movie one morning, which says a lot about the man’s working methods. Steckler was a guy who clearly believed in inspiration over careful planning, and while he certainly knew how to write a screenplay and draw up a production schedule, the oddball notions and manic energy of Steckler’s best work suggest the thinking of a man who believed the first impulse was the best impulse. Steckler was also not to sort of person to let little things like money or logistics get in the way of putting his ideas on screen; Steckler’s best-known movie, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (billed as “The World’s First Monster Musical!”) was shot on a budget of less than $40,000, and when he decided his crime thriller The Depraved wasn’t turning out so well after a few days of shooting, he transformed it into a wacky superhero spoof called Rat Pfink and Boo-Boo. And what to do when the man who designed the title cards accidentally rendered the name as Rat Pfink a Boo-Boo? Steckler kept it that way – it would cost too much to change it, and besides, it was funnier like that.

Ray Dennis Steckler died on Wednesday, January 7 in his adopted hometown of Las Vegas at the age of 70; Steckler had reportedly been in poor heath during his last months, but was still hard at work on his latest project, the long-promised sequel to The Incredibly Strange Creatures. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1939, Steckler (like fellow maverick filmmaker Russ Meyer) got his first experience behind the camera while serving a hitch in the Army, and after returning to civilian life he moved to Los Angeles, hoping to break into the movie business. Steckler’s career with the major studios never got further than working as a go-fer at Universal Studios (where he claimed to have nearly flattened Alfred Hitchcock while rolling some flats across a back lot), so he turned to the independent outfits cranking out drive-in fodder, where he found greater freedom and opportunity. After serving as a cameraman on Timothy Carey’s frantic The World’s Greatest Sinner, the unintentionally comic resurrected caveman thriller Eegah! and a few other low-budget features, Steckler landed his first directorial project in 1962 – Wild Guitar, a lively melodrama about a would-be rock star named Bud Eagle (played by Arch Hall Jr., the son of the picture’s producer and screenwriter) and his introduction to the sleazy size of the music business. Steckler also acted in the movie under the stage name Cash Flagg, playing the memorably obnoxious hipster Steak, and “Cash” would be a regular fixture in Steckler’s movies, most memorably in The Lemon Grove Kids Meet The Monsters, a threadbare homage to the Bowery Boys movies of the 1940’s and 50’s with Steckler channeling the spirit of Huntz Hall as Gopher. Wild Guitar also featured a brief appearance by Carolyn Brandt, Steckler’s favorite leading lady who would star in many of his best films; she was also his wife for several years.

Two years after Wild Guitar hit America’s drive-ins, Steckler marshaled his limited resources and made The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies, a fascinating mélange of chase sequences, musical numbers, backstage drama and comic set pieces shot in richly saturated color (the then unknown Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond were part of the camera crew) and set in a bustling carnival (with nearly everyone who worked on the movie serving double duty in the crowd scenes). The Incredibly Strange Creatures is the ultimate Steckler film, overflowing with ideas and moving nimbly from one scene to the next with such élan that it’s easy to miss the fact that none of it makes much sense. While the picture reached its largest television audience when it appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000 with Mike Nelson and his robot companions adding derisive commentary, the title alone was enough to earn it a lively cult following, and legendary rock critic Lester Bangs wrote a witty appreciation of the movie for Creem Magazine in 1973. However, the film was seen to its best advantage during its original theatrical release; Steckler shipped monster costumes to movie houses along with prints of the film, with instructions that the theaters staff was to run up and down the aisles as certain moments, impersonating ghouls who had invaded the auditorium. (Steckler and his pals joined the monsters for screenings in Los Angeles.)

Unfortunately, while Steckler would direct a few more worthwhile movies in the 1960’s (including the memorably titled detective yarn Body Fever), he left California for Las Vegas in the early 1970’s, and though he remained prolific (working under a dizzying variety of assumed named, including Wolfgang Schmidt, Sven Christian and Harry Nixon), his work was never quite as interesting, and while he held on to his talent for stretching a buck, his budgets shrank to the point that some of his efforts looked more like glorified home movies than anything else. However, Steckler didn’t seem to fret about such things – he stayed busy shooting porn movies (both hardcore and softcore, frequently using the alias Cindy Lou Sutters), teaching film classes and running a successful video store in Las Vegas. In 1986, Steckler’s reputation received a major boost when V. Vale and Andrea Juno of ReSearch Publications included an in-depth interview with the maverick director in their book Incredibly Strange Films (the title inspired by Steckler’s masterpiece). Steckler continued to crank out a steady stream of direct-to-video projects for his new audience (many released by Steckler himself, some shot on Hi-8 video when 16mm film became too expensive) and appeared at film fan conventions, happily willing to resurrect the Cash Flagg persona at a moment’s notice.

While Steckler seemed genuinely happy for the attention that was given to his work in later years, in interviews he seemed to bristle at the notion that his movies were “so bad they’re good.” And Steckler had good reason to defend his films; while The Incredibly Strange Creatures, The Thrill Killers, Rat Pfink a Boo-Boo and Wild Guitar are many miles away from polished Hollywood productions, their rough edges are part of what makes them interesting, and they’re all filled with a potent, unpredictable energy, as if anything could happen in them at any time. Call his pictures “Differently Good” rather than “Bad,” and ponder that even in a world where digital video gear and on-line distribution threatens to change the shape of the movie business as we know it, no one today is making movies quite as joyously wild as Ray Dennis Steckler could churn out on one of those days when he came up with a great idea.