Wild Guitar (1962).The films of low budget director Ray Dennis Steckler present a unique balancing act between familiar B-movie tropes and the unexpected. With Wild Guitar (1962), The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies!!? (1964), The Thrill Killers (1964), and Rat Pfink A Boo Boo (1966), Steckler, a self-acknowledged Hollywood outsider, crafted a series of idiosyncratic low budget features in the heart of Tinseltown before eventually decamping to Las Vegas in 1970 for a career in porn and to teach film classes at the University of Nevada. In these energetic early films, his characters—drifters, rock ‘n’ rollers, killers, dropouts, superheroes, and struggling actors—seem to be plucked from Hollywood Boulevard and set down in a pulp comic come to life. The Hollywood strip appears again and again in the director’s films as a symbol of intoxicating fantasy and disillusionment. Indeed, Steckler’s work embodies, at first glance, a simple teenage dream of celebrity,...
- 6/13/2022
- MUBI
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