Red Heat (1976, Ray Dennis Steckler)

Just what it is with Ray Dennis Steckler and lethal redheaded women who are a little too handy around switchblades? That type haunts not only his porno movie Red Heat, but also his 1979 horror movie The Hollywood Strangler meets the Skid Row Slasher as well as his 2003 short film ‘Slashed…’ In fact Red Heat ties in to Steckler’s other films in so many different, complex ways, that trying to work out precisely how may well be the most complicated thing I’ve ever tried to explain.

Basically, Red Heat is a side-sequel to 1974’s Fire Down Below, well sort of anyway. It also comes across as an early try out for the storyline of Steckler’s The Hollywood Strangler meets the Skidrow Slasher, which is a remake of this film, well sort of anyway. There is also the possibility that Steckler either remade Red Heat as 2003’s ‘Slashed…’ or possibly just reworked footage from Red Heat into Slashed. As I say, it is head scratchingly complicated, and illustrates the erratic approach Steckler had to filmmaking in his final decades, where he would start a project, never finish it, put the footage to one side, then a few years later come back to it, shoot some more footage, combine that with footage intended for a completely different film, resulting in Steckler's movies snowballing into complete malformations of footage and genres. Red Heat, bless it, is quite the malformation, it is a hardcore sex film, but its also a female slasher movie, and also a biker movie, and also a Las Vegas travelogue, and also a deconstruction of a hardcore sex film.

Red Heat is all things to all men, all vaguely tied together by Steckler’s alter-ego ‘Cindy Lou Sutters’. Steckler would direct a whole number of adult movies under the name Cindy Lou Sutters. The implication that these films were directed by a woman being a common ruse used by male pornographers to make their movies stand out from the crowd. Steckler takes this deception one step further in Red Heat, both capitalising of the popularity of Cindy Lou Sutters movies and further concealing his involvement in porno, by presenting Cindy Lou Sutters as an actual character in ‘her’ own movie. Mostly heard in voiceover, provided by Steckler’s ex-wife Carolyn Brandt, Cindy Lou recounts her adventures shooting porno footage in Las Vegas along with her trusted cameraman Habib. The first porno shoot Cindy Lou and Habib embark on involves Nancy, a three time divorcee who has drifted into porn acting. As Cindy Lou cynically points out to us “she’ll get paid well for what she has been giving away for free”.

The person Cindy Lou really has an eye on casting in her movie though is a burlesque dancer called Red Heat (yes, that is actually the character’s name in the film). Cindy Lou thinks Red Heat will make a great X-rated film star, but Red can’t commit due to her abusive, no good boyfriend. A man hilariously nicknamed ‘Mr Prick’ by Cindy Lou. Mr Prick is played by Steckler favourite Pierre Agostino, who’d go on to distinguish himself with repulsive star turns in Steckler’s The Hollywood Strangler meets the Skidrow Slasher and The Las Vegas Serial Killer. Mercifully all of the scenes involving Agostino fucking around with other women behind Red’s back are shot as softcore, sparing us the sight of what the Hollywood Strangler’s cock looks like.

Red comes home early from her audition for a Cindy Lou Sutters movie and catches him fucking another woman on their couch. Charming as ever, Agostino calls Red a “dumb fucking broad”, proceeds to strangle her (let’s face it, it wouldn’t be a Steckler film without at least one woman being strangled) before rendering Red unconscious by repeatedly punching her in the face. “Little did we know that there were some strange things going on in Las Vegas, that would make our X-rated movie making look like a fairy tale” notes Cindy Lou. Having had enough of Mr Prick, Red Heat picks up a switchblade and offs him in the shower, Psycho style. A scene with an incredible colour scheme to it, with almost everything onscreen, Red’s hair, Agostino’s blood splattered body and the bathroom walls, being bright red.



Having developed a taste for bloodshed, Red takes her switchblade on the road, hitchhiking her way around Vegas and taking that switchblade to any promiscuous slob who is stupid enough to offer her a ride. As I say, it’s very much a Las Vegas rehearsal for The Hollywood Strangler meets the Skidrow Slasher, which handed the role of the switchblade wielding redhead to Steckler’s ex-wife Carolyn Brandt, and extended Mr Agostino’s misogynistic bit part here to co-star status.

As if having a runaway star on her hands wasn’t enough to ruin Cindy Lou Sutters’ day, the female porn director finds her work further compromised by a biker, who shows up in Las Vegas to commit a series of robberies. Inadvertently, the biker ends up causing Cindy Lou further headaches, when he robs her cameraman Habib and also holds up a Vegas massage parlour, which provides Cindy Lou with acting talent. All of which leaves Ms Lou Sutters seriously out of pocket, with still lots more smut to film.

Any seasoned fan of Cindy Lou’s earlier work will be struck with a sense of deja vu about this sub-plot… you see this biker character had appeared before in her….sorry his earlier film ‘Fire Down Below’ (1974). In that film the biker’s exploits were played out alongside that of a tubby voyeur (Will Long) who also strangled most of the women he spied on. In fact the bulk of the ‘biker’ footage in Red Heat, the biker robbing Habib’s wallet, the biker holding up the massage parlour, is recycled material from Fire Down Below. Steckler does however show lots more footage of the biker cruising around in Red Heat than made it into Fire Down Below, presumably because Fire Down Below was meant to be set in Los Angeles. So any footage that reveals the biker scenes were actually filmed in Las Vegas, like shots showing casinos and the Las Vegas strip in the background, got the chop from Fire Down Below, and instead found a home in Red Heat.



Since Red Heat was meant to have been filmed in 1976, and the footage of the biker comes from a 1974 film, you’d therefore expect that the biker subplot would be played out entirely separate from the other two plots about Cindy Lou Sutters and Red Heat. It’s quite surprising then to discover that the biker and the Red Heat plots do tie in together at the end of the film, with the two characters sharing screen time. Having two seemingly disconnected plots that collide head on at the end of a film, being something of a trademark of Steckler’s. RDS ends The Hollywood Strangler meets the Skidrow Slasher, Fire Down Below and The Las Vegas Serial Killer in a similar fashion.

I suppose it is possible that Steckler got the actor who played the biker to reprise his Fire Down Below role again two years later, but the fact that his bike, his clothes and helmet remain the same throughout, leads me to suspect that all of the ‘Red Heat’ plot was filmed in 1974 too. Could Red Heat’s ‘female slasher’ plot have originally been intended for Fire Down Below?, and that Steckler envisioned that film as juggling the exploits of its tubby serial strangler and the biker robber, alongside Red Heat’s murder rampage? Only for Steckler to decide that Red Heat deserved a film to herself, cut all the scenes relating to her out of Fire Down Below and instead used them two years later for this film? As I say, trying to piece the history of this film together may well be the most complicated thing I’ve ever tried to explain.

As they stand, Red Heat and Fire Down Below are sort of side-sequels to each other, they both share a character in the biker, the same incidents play out in both movies, and the tubby strangler’s Los Angeles murder rampage in Fire Down Below plays out at the same time as Red Heat is taking her switchblade to guys in Las Vegas. I have a feeling though that Steckler realised that the plots about the strangler, the biker and Red Heat were too much for one movie, especially one that already had to accommodate lengthy hardcore sex scenes. My theory is that the idea to spin-off Red Heat’s story into a different movie entered into Steckler’s head towards the end of shooting Fire Down Below, since ‘spoilers’ the way the biker dies at the end of Fire Down Below is different to the way the biker dies at the end of Red Heat. A sure indication that Steckler intended to spread this footage out over two movies, if he was shooting two different death scenes for the same character.

The Cindy Lou Sutters hardcore footage and the Las Vegas footage that is in the film appears to date from 1976, a pairing of Mac Davis and Joan Rivers advertised on one of the marquees took place in November 1976. Not even this is straightforward though as elsewhere in the movie there is a marquee advertising Village People as the headlining act at the Riviera, a group who weren’t put together and didn’t start having hits till way into 1977, which in itself throws a spanner in the works over Red Heat being a 1976 film!!



Red Heat captures Steckler at the mid-way point of his hardcore directing career, and finds him both trying to integrate himself into the adult movie industry, whilst at the same time becoming jaded and disillusioned by it. Red Heat is a far more slicker looking production than his earlier adult films, with the 1976 footage looking as if it were shot on 35mm. Gone are the dysfunctional basket cases of his earlier X-rated films, replaced by a less memorable bunch, who are at least, successfully able to have sex on camera.

Steckler’s device of having ‘Cindy Lou Sutters’ narrate and comment over the film footage ‘she’ is supposedly shooting has a curiously anti-erotic effect to it. Instead of being lulled into believing that the sex unfolding onscreen is all natural and spontaneous, hearing Cindy Lou and Habib constantly talk to the performers, ordering them what to do and telling them how to fuck, reminds you that all sex in porn movies is stage managed and artificial. ‘Cindy Lou Sutters’ comes across as a tough talking, hard bitten porno pro, at one point telling her star “Nancy get that little thing up, see if it can scare the camera” as Nancy unzips a guy’s pants. Cindy Lou calls time on an elongated shot of Nancy kissing her male co-star with “I think that’s enough kissing, let’s see some tit”.

Red Heat is a self-analysing film that is constantly deconstructing and pulling itself apart for you. Midway through the film Steckler throws in what looks suspiciously like home movie footage of Lake Mead. Just when you’re about to chalk this up as superfluous, up pops Cindy Lou/Carolyn Brandt on the soundtrack admitting that …yes…this is all superfluous ‘back ground footage’ which she threw into the film because “too many X-rated movies are shot in back rooms”. The effect is akin to watching the film with the director’s DVD commentary on, albeit the sort of DVD commentary an adult movie director would do in an especially candid mood, having got up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. Cindy Lou’s narration is often hilariously mean-spirited and extremely blunt about the people who are onscreen. If you feel guilty about finding someone onscreen ugly, Red Heat instantly absolves you of such guilt by having Cindy Lou chip in some put downs and bio info about her cast “she’s had four kids….we had to make do”.

Steckler, of course, never acknowledged his adult movies, let alone opened up about them, meaning Cindy Lou’s narration is the closest we’ll ever get to a porno confessional from him. Hiding behind a voiceover by his ex-wife, and his ‘Cindy Lou Sutters’ alter-ego, does seem to have allowed Steckler the comfort of giving an off the cuff account of his Las Vegas porn directing days. Cindy Lou believably recounts money troubles, the pressure of shooting porn, procuring talent from a massage parlour; dealing with a ‘small time pimp’ who is into underage girls and shooting in flophouse motels “we needed a more seedy atmosphere” confesses Cindy Lou. When Cindy Lou explains that a low budget dictated she hire a few hookers and a weightlifter from a local gym for a scene “the girls weren’t much to look out, but we were running low on moves” the awkward, overly muscular man onscreen and the out of shape, tattooed women servicing him lend authenticity to Cindy Lou’s words.
Only towards the end of Red Heat does the narration track begin to lose credibility as ‘Cindy Lou’ finally appears onscreen herself, blowing her lead actor and cameraman Habib in order to ensure she has enough porno footage to finish the film. ‘Cindy Lou’ is portrayed by a baby faced 20-something blonde, who in no way fits the mental image that Carolyn Brandt’s jaded, middle aged voiceover conjures up of her, and the idea of a swinging 20-something blonde directing adult movies and happily fucking crew members feels like the stuff of stroke magazine fiction.



'Cindy Lou Sutters'

Carolyn Brandt’s involvement in the film does however invite curiosity over the extent of her involvement in her ex-husband’s adult movies. It is now generally thought that Steckler and Carolyn Brandt divorced in 1973, yet she still continued to be around his filmmaking activities, including his porno ones, regularly appearing onscreen in non-sex roles (as ‘Jane Bond’) and doing voiceover work on them as late as 1983’s Las Vegas Erotica. It has even been rumoured in some quarters that the Cindy Lou Sutters films were actually collaborative efforts between her and Steckler. Could the claims that the Cindy Lou Sutters films were directed by a woman actually have some credibility after all? Could Carolyn Brandt be a forgotten, pioneering female pornographer, who is long overdue the critical recognition and kudos currently being bestowed on the likes of Roberta Findlay and Doris Wishman? The insults dished out to the women onscreen here, often noting how many times they’ve been married and how many children they’ve had, do feel like the sort of thing an acid tongued, bitchy female would say, rather than a misogynistic male filmmaker.

For a film supposedly directed by a man Red Heat is also an extremely cock heavy film, often expressing little interest in the female form in favour of filling the screen with alarmingly extreme close-ups of guy’s cocks. Evidence of a woman’s touch? Possibly, then again Steckler’s pornos are so hung-up on oral sex that all the male genitalia onscreen could be just the by-product of Steckler’s blowjob obsession. An all-consuming fixation that often results in you feeling like shaking Sheckler and reminding him that women do …y’know…have over orifices. Unless Carolyn opens up about ‘Cindy Lou’ though, the extent of her involvement in these films is unlikely to be known.

One of the saddest parts of Cindy Lou Sutters’ narration comes with her matter of fact remark that “people who pay to see X-rated films want to see some real action, they’re not interested in lots of dialogue they can see that for free on TV”. It is difficult to hear that remark and not detect Steckler’s underlining resentment at working in such a limiting genre. The fact that he was still able to pull off such an unconventional film as Red Heat, that frequently veers off into slasher movie and biker genres, would suggest he was a little less restricted by the genre than Cindy Lou’s comment implies, but this is still clearly a film made by someone who felt their creative wings were being clipped.

Steckler might not have loved being a Las Vegas porn director but the man clearly loved Las Vegas. Steckler crafts Red Heat into a big, shiny, Valentines Day card to Vegas. Steckler was always big on making the environment around him part of the action, an approach that didn’t always pay off, the torturously dull footage of a local rodeo that he tagged onto his 1971 horror film ‘Blood Shack’ comes to mind. Here though, Steckler found a muse in Las Vegas that was truly worthy of its glorified co-star status. Red Heat gives you everything you’d want from a film made in Vegas. Early on it’s pretty clear that this isn’t just the work of some out of town filmmaker whose idea of setting a film in Vegas is a few brief establishing shots of the strip, but of someone who knew the town like the back of his hand. By the end of Red Heat you feel as if Steckler has given you the grand tour around every casino, bar, motel, car rental business, porno theatre, dirty bookshop, peep show and wedding chapel that 1970s Vegas had to offer. Nothing escapes Steckler’s eye here, thirsty dogs hanging out of windows, confused looking old timers shuffling around in plaid pants, guys in cowboy hats, teenage girls in ass hugging sports shorts, all human life is here. Ginormous marquees advertise the likes of Barry Manilow, Tony Bennett, Helen Reddy and ol’ boyo himself Tom Jones.

Some might feel there is a mischievous, even malicious edge to visually name checking such famous people in a film like this. One minute the names of squeaky clean, family friendly entertainers are up onscreen in Red Heat, then moments later we’re cutting to some motel room cocksucking. For anyone who has ever pounded those streets though, Steckler’s depiction of Las Vegas feels on the money in terms of how much sex and showbiz co-exist in that town. I don’t know if this still goes on, but the last time I was in Vegas, we’d be talking early 2000s here, the strip was lined with gentlemen who appeared to be from ‘across the border’ all handing out these obscene pamphlets advertising the services of motel room hookers, fully illustrated with legs-a-kimbo photos of the women in question. Walking down the strip, with the desert sun beating down on you, you’d have these pamphlets thrust in your direction, then look upwards and see the faces of Barry Manilow and Saint Wayne of Newton staring down at you disapprovingly from the marquees. Red Heat accurately captures this schizophrenic side to Las Vegas. Vice and family entertainment sleep in the same bed in Vegas, and might even be fuck buddies.



While Stecker’s involvement in adult movies has been known about for decades now, little is known about his leading lady in this movie. The actress who plays ‘Red Heat’ goes uncredited in the film, never participates in the hardcore sex scenes and appears to have never acted in any other movies. So, just who is ‘Red Heat’? I may have inadvertently stumbled upon the answer whilst researching ‘Slashed…’ a video Steckler released in 2003. Slashed was a supposedly long unreleased film that Steckler made with his girlfriend at the time, explaining in a 2004 interview “I started another film with a girlfriend, a stripper called Lovie (sic) Goldmine. I started making a slasher movie with her and about fifty per cent of the way through the film she told me she had to leave town immediately. She took her kids and disappeared and I never heard from her again”.

Supposedly Slashed… was the first time this unreleased and uncompleted film had seen the light of day. Personally, I’m not so sure. See if you look around the internet for photos of Lovey Goldmine, she bears more than a passing resemblance to ‘Red Heat’. In fact if Lovey Goldmine and the actress who plays Red Heat in this movie aren’t one in the same, I’ll happily eat my Stetson on the steps of the MGM Grand whilst illegal immigrants pelt me with whoring pamphlets.



Lovey Goldmine in the early 1970s, and the lead actress in Red Heat.  One in the same?

My guess is that years before ‘Slashed…’ Steckler actually used the footage he had of Lovely Goldmine and worked it into Red Heat. Ms. Goldmine had in fact been a Las Vegas burlesque dancer in the early 1970s (aside from Steckler, she also famously dated Richard Pryor for a while) before getting the call to perform at Le Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris. This being the likely reason why she left Steckler,and never finished the film. Steckler’s loss being the Crazy Horse’s gain.

Steckler sure was having his share of rotten luck when it came to leads during this period, not just leading ladies but leading men as well. Will Long, a regular in Steckler’s porn movies like The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire and Peeping Tom (Long was the man I referred to as ‘Buford’ in my review of that film) contracted hepatitis whilst playing the serial strangler in Fire Down Below, then rather inconveniently died before completing the film, leaving Steckler to piece that film together in a Bruce Lee/Game of Death fashion. It seems that in the early 2000s, Steckler re-edited Red Heat, removing all the hardcore footage, but including all the ‘slasher movie’ material he’d shot with Lovey Goldmine. The resultant 25 minute video being ‘Slashed…’. Around the same time Steckler did another re-edit on one of his 1970s pornos, re-releasing Fire Down Below, sans hardcore footage, as ‘Face of Evil’.

In terms of sexiness, Lovey Goldmine is undoubtedly Red Heat’s strongest assets, whether it’s dressing up in the lingerie and peacock hair feathered crown that was presumably part of her stage act back then, or stripping off to display the body that dazzled the strip in the 1970s. For X-rated cinemagoers, the only downside to her appearance in Red Heat is that the only attractive person in the film is also the only cast member not to have real sex on camera. For Ms. Goldmine does not at any point get the shaft!!!

Despite the distance Steckler later put between himself and his adult movies, the films he made during his final decades that don’t feature the inclusion of hardcore sex just feel dull and lacking like Blood Shack, or numbingly repetitious like The Las Vegas Serial Killer. Give me Fire Down Below and Red Heat over those two any day. Disjointed and singing from several different hymn sheets as Red Heat might be, this mutant hybrid of gore movie, biker movie, porno and Vegas travelogue can never be accused of being dull. Like Vegas itself, it’s always putting on some kind of entertaining show for the masses. For all of Steckler’s attempts to play the adult movie industry’s game, Red Heat is still a misfit in that world, something that doesn’t quite fit in with the XXX crowd, much as Steckler’s earlier work had put him at odds with mainstream Hollywood decades before.

“I still wonder to this day whether Red would have made a good porno star” - Cindy Lou Sutters.