Random thoughts on: Horror Express (1972)

Warning: if you watch Horror Express on Halloween you may wake up the next morning to discover your entire face has transformed into a Telly Savalas album “if a picture paints a thousand words, then why can’t I paint you”?



Aka ‘Good Guys Wear Tweed’. Seriously though, is there any greater evidence that Cushing and Lee were a marvellous screen double-act than Horror Express, impossible to watch the film and not miss them both, dearly.



This dog really, really doesn’t want to be in the movie does it? In the context of the film its meant to ‘sense’ the danger posed by the creature in the crate, in reality it probably wants to get away because this mad woman is intent on plucking it like a turkey.



On the basis of revisiting this film I’m convinced that allot of the personality, and the sense of humour at work in both Horror Express and Psychomania comes from their writing duo of Arnaud d'Usseau and Julian Zimet, the pair had a real ear for witty dialogue “Monster? We're British, you know” has rightly entered into legend.



“shhh, don’t wake her up, she’s a dreadful actress”. In fairness Faith Clift isn’t too bad in a small role here, its only later when she played one of the main roles in Cataclysm (1980) that her ‘limitations’ become more obvious. I wonder what the story was with her and film producer Philip Yordan. Cataclysm comes across as a thinly veiled excuse to promote her acting, and Clift doesn’t appear to have ever acted outside of Yordan’s productions (although he goes uncredited in Horror Express, I believe Yordan did have a financial stake in the production)



To misquote Kate Bush “Faith Clift, its me, your Telly, I’ve come home”

It does seem unusual that the ‘This is Telly Savalas’ album knocked on the door of Horror Express for its cover photo, rather than going the more obvious Kojak route. Then again, that is a damn cool image, I mean Telly is holding a cigarette and a gun in the same hand ferchristsakes!!



‘If’ isn’t actually on that album, but Telly does sing Dylan on it.




‘Arranged, conducted and produced by John Cacavas’. Who seems to have been Telly’s main man in that respect, Cacavas having done soundtrack duties on both Kojak and Horror Express.



Throwing around diminutive Chinese men, whipping a monk and hitting on women, Telly sure knows how to gate-crash a party



"God made a few beautiful heads, the rest he covered with hair"- Telly Savalas



“If the world should stop revolving spinning slowly down to die, I'd spend the end with you.”

Skyscraper (1996)

I hereby predict that in a few years from now, once people have exhausted 1980s nostalgia and moved on to getting all misty eyed over the direct to video action films and erotic thrillers of the 1990s, then Skyscraper will be worshipped in the same way that people today queue up to worship at the altars of Ninja 3: The Domination and The Miami Connection. Like those films, Skyscraper is very era specific in its ludicrousness, actors who look like Fabio, the use of pagers, purportedly ‘erotic’ sex scenes that will make you laugh out loud and Eurotrash villains who quote Shakespeare and speak pidgin French….N'est-ce pas. Skyscraper’s day as a cult item must surely beckon.

Nothing- not even exposure to the likes of Nai Bonet, Julie Lee and Renee Harmon- can quite prepare you for the experience that is an Anna Nicole Smith acting performance. Yet had this film been made with a B-level male action star in the lead it would probably be just another forgettable, cheap, by the numbers Die Hard imitation, whereas Anna Nicole Smith could never be accused of being forgettable, paradoxically she is the worst thing about this film and the most memorable thing about this film too. God bless her and her melon heavy breasts. 

Carnivore: Werewolf of London (2017)

Not the most original of film, Carnivore: Werewolf of London clearly…badly… wants to be Dog Soldiers, and proudly slaps a quote proclaiming it “very similar to Dog Soldiers, but with civilians” over the DVD cover. Carnavore is more ‘very similar to Dog Soldiers, but with characters straight out of a Red Shoe Diaries sequel’, as lovebirds Abi (Atlanta Johnson) and Dave (Ben Loyd-Holmes) attempt to work on their relationship with a romantic trip to an isolated rental home in the country. She is an American with commitment issues, he is a British bulldog who despite his cage fighter/Jason Statham’s stunt double appearance is a romantic at heart and wants to make an honest woman out of her. Their arguments, bad dancing and softcore lovemaking (scored to saccharine, acoustic love songs) have to be put on hold though once the green eyed monster rears its ugly head. No, not jealousy, but a green eyed werewolf, whose appearance leads the couple to some laughably illogical behaviour. Trapped at a remote woodlands house, with a rampaging werewolf outside? Why not sit in a bathtub and arm yourself with a rolling pin? (the scene where the werewolf is clobbered about the head with said baking instrument must surely be a cinematic first). While macho Dave can’t resist antagonising the werewolf by stripping off his shirt and running through the forest with a lit torch, presumably meant as a homage to Schwarzenegger in Predator.

Against considerable odds Carnivore: Werewolf of London is surprisingly likeable, Atlanta Johnson is easy on the eye, the low budget part practical, part CGI effects aren’t the disaster area that they can be, and to give credit where its due Carnivore is the most entertaining 21st century British horror film I’ve seen in a long while. No genre game changer by any stretch of the imagination, just an unapologetically dumb monster-on-the-loose movie. A Rawhead Rex for the supermarket DVD era if you will.

Deathsport (1978)

According to IMDB trivia “David Carradine smoked a lot of marijuana while shooting this film”. Gee, you don’t say...cause I’d never have guessed that going off how clean-cut and sober he looks in this film.

The various remakes, prequels, rip-offs and ‘thematic’ sequels to Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000 do seem to split into two different groups. Some like Death Race 2050 try to recapture the black comedy and satire of Bartel’s film but fall of their asses when it comes to being an action movie, others like the Statham/Luke Goss movies press down hard on the action movie pedal but leave the humour in the dust. 1978’s Deathsport, Roger Corman/New World’s sort of follow-up to Death Race 2000, is very much of the latter camp, its action packed yet all rather po-faced and lacking much of a personality. The barely coherent plot of Deathsport, set "a thousand years from tomorrow" involves nomadic psychics played by David Carradine and Claudia Jennings being rounded up and imprisoned by cruel dictator Lord Zirpola. Since the death penalty has been abolished a thousand years from tomorrow, Carradine and Jennings are forced to compete in the ‘Deathsport’ basically gladiatorial games that Zirpola uses to satisfy the bloodshed of the violence loving masses. Meanwhile, Zirpola gets his own jollies by electrocuting butt naked women in his own personal torture chamber. Once Carradine and Jennings escape Lord Zirpola’s clutches the film becomes a chase across the desert on futuristic motorbikes, as they are hunted by Zirpola’s leather clad henchman Ankar Moor (Richard Lynch) and somehow also find the time to rescue a little girl from a tribe of ping-pong ball eyed mutants.

Calling this a ‘troubled production’ is putting it mildly, stories about on-set drug use, physical altercations between cast and crew and people getting fired have surrounded this film for years. The saga resurfaced in the early 1990s when a David Carradine interview led to a heated war of words between Carradine and original director Nicholas Niciphor in the letters page of Psychotronic Video magazine over what exactly went down on set.

Evidence of this collectively bad experience is all up there onscreen, Deathsport is a particularly messy film, a character built up as a major villain is abruptly and unceremoniously killed off mid-way through the film, the titular ‘Deathsport’ meant to be a main plot point only gets about 10 minutes of screen time, and Carradine appears especially agitated and bad tempered throughout. Then again, given that he spends much of the film wandering about the desert in a diaper, wielding a plywood sword and playing a character who appears to be a combo of Jesus, Luke Skywalker and Evel Knievel, who can really blame him. Carradine really does look like a man who has been through the desert on a horse with no name in this film.



I first encountered Deathsport on the Granada Men and Motors channel (of all places), a low-rent TV channel whose blokeish output mostly consisted of T&A and sports programming, but who went through a brief period of showing ultra-obscure action and kung-fu movies at ungodly hours of the night. Since Death Race 2000 was still fresh in my mind at the time, I was pretty underwhelmed by Deathsport initially, but I have found that it grows on you over each successive viewing. Especially if you return to it fully in the knowledge that you’re not going to get another Death Race 2000 here, and I’m happy to admit I had lots of fun with it this time around. The combined charisma of Carradine, Claudia Jennings and Richard Lynch somehow keep this shambolic ship afloat, the cut-price ‘futuristic’ costumes and vehicles lend laughability and Deathsport does boast an entertainingly reckless obsession with pyrotechnics and motorbike stunts.

There is a particularly jaw dropping moment when an actor who was meant to be set on fire accidently brushes past and sets alight to another actor who clearly wasn’t meant to be set on fire, and boy does that poor bastard look frantic and alarmed as he tries to put himself out. All of which they of course left in the film!! If we learn nothing else from Deathsport it is that stoned actors should never be let anywhere near lit torches.

The fact that the film was salvaged by one of Corman’s in-house directors means that Deathsport is pretty much your textbook 1970s Roger Corman production, X amount of female nudity, X amount of violence, XXX amount of things blowing up, and some left-leaning/eco politics (about how we should renounce violence, grow beards and go back to riding about on horseback)... y’know for all the students and the chin strokers out there.

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.

Peeping Tom (1973, Ray Dennis Steckler)

“The Lord above made the world for us, but the devil made Las Vegas” – Tony Christie 

Sometimes writing causes you to pique your interest in a subject even further. Such is the case with the adult movies of Ray Dennis Steckler. Back in December 2017, I wrote up Steckler’s 1974 porno/stalker movie Fire Down Below, and in doing so, spurred myself on into ordering a DVD from Vinegar Syndrome, who put a threesome of Steckler’s pornos –Peeping Tom, The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire, and Red Heat- onto disc.

A man who needs little introduction in cult movie circles, Ray Dennis Steckler (1938-2009) worked on the fringes of Hollywood from the late 1950s onwards while simultaneously directing one of a kind, idiosyncratic oddities like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and became Mixed Up Zombies (1964), Rat Pfink A Boo Boo (1966), and The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters (1965). Films that would later be re-discovered in the early 1980s, and lead to Steckler and his acting alter-ego ‘Cash Flagg’ becoming cult figures. Whilst waiting for cult stardom to come calling though, Steckler still had to pay the bills and kept afloat during his leaner 1970s period by turning to hardcore filmmaking. Steckler spent much of the 1970s and the early 80s in the adult industry, with mainstream credits being few and far between. Curiously he was thrown some legit work by British producer Greg Smith, he of the ‘Confessions of…’ movies. Steckler and his ex-wife Carolyn Brandt were hired to do some camerawork on Smith’s credit card fraud comedy ‘Funny Money’ (1983), presumably for its early scenes, which take place in Steckler’s adopted home of Las Vegas.

Steckler’s involvement in hardcore pornography was done under a slew of pseudonyms and wasn’t widely known till the 1990s, when knowledgeable companies like Something Weird Video and Alpha Blue Archives started nosing around in America’s pornographic past. Perhaps carelessly in retrospect, Steckler had left traces of himself all over these movies. Steckler’s ex-wife Carolyn Brandt frequently had non-sex roles in his adult movies, Brandt and Steckler regularly lent their voices to these films’ soundtracks, providing narration duties, and some of the same pseudonyms and cast members that Steckler used in his legit movies also showed up in his pornos. Its not difficult to put two and two together and detect Steckler’s directorial involvement in these films.

Evidentially Steckler wasn’t proud of his involvement in the adult industry, his website never mentioned these films, leading to large gaps in his filmography there, and he would reportedly put the phone down on anyone who dared to bring them up in interviews. Some rumours even claim that Steckler’s years in hardcore eventually lead him to seek psychiatric treatment. Steckler’s later legit films like The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher (1979) and The Las Vegas Serial Killer (1986), do put forward a case that his involvement with hardcore had changed him, and made Steckler more misanthropic. Anyone expecting to encounter the silly, joy de vivre of his early work in these films, instead will run headfirst into depressing, repetitious movies, heavily focused on the strangulation of women. Steckler’s later movies do little to conceal his adult movie involvement, it is impossible to watch Hollywood Strangler or The Las Vegas Serial Killer, and not reach the conclusion that these were a pornographer’s side projects. The world of The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher… full of Z-grade actresses playing nude models, crummy motel rooms, cutaways to the dirty bookshops and porno theatres of LA, plus the constant, misogynistic narration, illustrate just how tainted by porno Steckler had become.

In truth, I have mixed feelings about documenting Steckler’s pornos. You see, Rat Pfink A Boo Boo was one of my favourite childhood movies, how I must have played the shit out of that VHS tape…so part of me feels as if I’m betraying the man’s memory by focusing on a part of his career that he didn’t want to deal with, yet once you’re aware that a person has a darker, sordid side to them…its difficult to resist exploring further.



One of Steckler’s earlier pornos 1973’s Peeping Tom (aka The Creeper) effectively serves as a Las Vegas companion piece to the following year’s Los Angeles set Fire Down Below. It has virtually the same plot, a creepy loser passes the time by peeking in on several sexual vignettes, which make up the bulk of the film’s hour long running time. Peeping Tom is weaker than Fire Down Below in some respects, and stronger in others. Whereas the tubby voyeur/serial killer of Fire Down Below is an unforgettable figure, whose misogynistic voiceover dominates the soundtrack and who frequently intrudes on the narrative by strangling several of the women he’d been peeping in on, here the peeping protagonist is a comparatively anonymous figure. Only fleetingly seen in between porno scenes, at times it is easy to forget that he is there at all, with him often becoming invisible for large stretches of the film. In keeping with the tacky atmosphere of the Las Vegas setting, the film’s narration, by Steckler himself, introduces the protagonist as if he were a talk show host welcoming a star guest “join him tonight as he takes a look behind the many locked doors of the city”.

Shots of this guy hanging around Las Vegas street corners, nervously puffing on cigarettes, and running down the strip in slow motion establishes him as a possibly on the lam criminal. For all the fanfare of Steckler’s introduction though, we never get more than a thumbnail sketch of the man. Peeping Tom is more interested in handing the mic over to the people he is peeping at, and capturing their various dramas and blow outs. For a porno movie, people talk allot in Peeping Tom…actually let me correct that slightly, people yell, argue and throw insults around allot in Peeping Tom. For some reason when he took to porno, Steckler seemed to transform into Andy Milligan. Very early on you learn that Steckler’s pornos don’t want to turn you on and make you happy, these movies want to spit in your face. Normal, harmonious sex seems to leave Steckler cold, when his films are functioning on that level, Steckler’s direction just amounts to letting film run through the camera. His pornos are only really alive when there is bad blood on the screen, when people are hollering and blowing their tops. In that respect, Peeping Tom lets off the mother of all firecrackers right away.



Sexual Vignette 1# The peeping tom gets an eyeful and insight into the bad marriage of a white trash couple. The husband is played by Jason Wayne, who also had a prominent role in Steckler’s horror cheapie Blood Shack, the wife is played by possibly the most foul mouthed woman who ever walked the face of the earth. The air instantly turns blue and abusive, when this woman calls a man ‘bitch’, ‘bastard’ and ‘you motherfucker’, you just know she means every word. She gets the ball rolling by accusing him of infidelity, “who the hell you been fucking tonight, mister?”, closely followed by “that’s why I was with my lawyer today, bitch”. Hubby’s fuse is as short as hers “you fucking pig, I’ll knock your teeth in” he threatens. “You’re insane” he tells her “yeah, I’m with you” she shoots back. The constant stream of put downs and below the belt insults seem to be the norm for this pair. The woman grins like a Cheshire cat, and never seems more happier than when she is taunting his inability to keep it up, or speculating that the amount of women he has been fucking behind her back has probably left him impotent. The real pornography in this scene seems to be the trash talk dialogue, with the hardcore sex thrown in as an afterthought. Rightly or wrongly the scene incriminates the actor, Steckler and the audience as the type of men who can only really get off on a woman if she is treating them like shit. If that is your bag then you may well end up regarding this woman as some kind of goddess. The mere casting of this woman in a film like this flies in the face of conventional porno …where you’re meant to be turned on and digging the people who are onscreen…rather than being terrified of them.

The only time this couple stop yelling is when their genitals are in each other’s mouths, and even then they can’t resist coming up for air and spitting out a few more put downs in the process. “Whatever happened to the great lover, you can’t even get it hard” she bitches. “You said you could get me off, shows how fake your word is” he whines back. There is dialogue in this scene where you just can’t believe what you are hearing. Thoughts, insults and expressions of sexual disgust which your average person would keep buried deep in the very back on your mind are yelled out loud here. “JESUS, WOMAN, YOUR CUNT SMELLS” is his high point when it comes to insults. Don’t feel too sorry for the woman on the receiving end of this degrading comment though, as she reliably comes back at him with the even greater, knockout comment of “SHUT UP, BITCH, BEFORE I FART IN YOUR FUCKING FACE”. Who said romance is dead? Really, the film should have just consisted of these two lovebirds going at it hammer and tongs for the entire movie. The woman in particular is sensational, if someone told me she went on to become a serial killer in real life, I’d believe every word of it. You definitely get a ‘straight outta Spahn Ranch’ vibe from this one.



Sexual Vignette 2# The problem with Peeping Tom is that it peaks early and never really recaptures the intensity of the first vignette. Just where do you go from there? The sight of a man complaining that his wife’s cunt smells and her threatening to fart in his face is - after all - a tough act to follow. Our second peek into down n’ dirty Las Vegas is a foursome between two married guys and two skanks they’ve picked up on the strip. The guys brag about being married, joke about fucking around behind their wives’ backs and take bets on how long their marriages will last. Mean spirited banter for sure, but it lacks the viciousness of the first segment. The actors, long haired lanky hippies whose appearance is at odd with the square suburbanites they’re meant to be playing, give the impression of just being here for the balling, and regard all this Steckler dialogue as an inconvenience. One of the gals has a beehive and looks as if she’s taken time off from serving cocktails at one of the Vegas casinos. She has breast implants, really painful looking, done on the cheap, early 70s ones. One of the guys jokes that although he is married, it is okay to cheat on his wife because they don’t have any children.

Steckler’s pornos manage to be both minimalist and evocative at the same time. Nearly all of the sex scenes in his hardcore films look as if they were filmed at cheap, flophouse motels way off the strip. The type whose owners turn a blind eye to the activities of hookers, porno filmmakers and adulteress couples, and whose clientele turn an equally blind eye to the garish, threadbare furnishings because they are only there for the sex. If you want to know where people went for cheap, anonymous sex in early 70s Las Vegas, let Ray Dennis Steckler pornos take you by the hand. Incongruously, a statue of a satanic figure sits on the bedside table as the foursome go at it. Lucifer is everywhere in Steckler’s hardcore movies. Some have bona fide occult themes like The Sexorcist Devil and Sexual Satanic Awareness, but even when they don’t RDS seems to have insisted on decorating the sets with occult paraphernalia. It is an obsession played out mostly in his porno movies, rarely getting an airing in his legit movies, read into that what you will. Steckler only appears interested in the sex here when it threatens to crumble into dust. He lingers over one of the women struggling to get the guy hard, futilely sucking on his limp dick. Another of the guys keeps losing wood. Moments that any conventional pornographer would have cut out, the threat of sexual failure being the last thing a porno audience wants to be confronted with. Otherwise, there is nothing much to see here, better move on, ya peeping bastard.



Sexual Vignette 3# Do my weary eyes deceive me, or is that the guy who played the serial strangler in Steckler’s Fire Down Below? Yup, it’s the same tubby guy. While he doesn’t get to strangle any women here, he does get to blow off lots of similar steam. He is a relentless chatterbox, never shutting the fuck up for a second, mostly about his own sexual greatness. “I’m hot, I’m horny…look at this body” he exclaims, basking in his narcissistic glory and flexing none existent pecs for a disinterested hooker. Uber macho, he sports cowboy boots and a massive gut, he has the appearance of a man who should be playing a redneck sheriff in a Burt Reynolds movie, the Buford T Justice of pornography. In his mind though, Buford is the king of all men, as well as God’s gift to all women, and now he gonna whip off all of his here clothes and do the business in a porno movie, to prove to all you sombitches out there that Buford is the greatest!!! His partner in the scene is a third rate Regina Carrol, who really…really…doesn’t want to be in this movie, and does her best to avoid getting her face on camera. In contrast to his excitable bragging and yelling, she is very much zoned out to the point that ol’ Buford has to undress her and himself. “I want you baby, I gotta get you, I’m hot, I’m gonna do it, I mean it” predictably Buford is all talk and little action. Then again, he might as well be fucking a blow up doll for all the interaction he gets from her.

There is a cruelty here; after all here we are watching a poor delusional slob making a fool of himself in a porno movie. It’s impossible to damn Steckler for filming this though, because like him, you just can’t look away, as Buford’s crazy outburst just gets louder and louder. “Talk to me, tell me the truth, tell me the truth!!!!, talk to me, I want dirty talk, tell me to fuck you, tell me to cum, tell me to cum” he hollers as he pounds his gargantuan weight away on top of her. This results in a few token orgasmic moans from her, which are laughable in their half-heartedness. At this point, you almost expect Rudy Ray Moore to burst into the motel room and start joking “honey, you might not know he is in you, but you sure as hell gonna know that he is on you”. That Steckler managed to salvage one, very brief penetration shot from this scene is miraculous, naturally there is no money shot.



“Beg me for it” asks Buford, she doesn’t. “Alright, alright, whatever” he grumbles, resigning himself to yet another sexual failure. Given his delusions of grandeur though, maybe it’s just as well Steckler partnered him up with a passive, spaced out chick whose wasn’t interested in bursting his bubble and telling it like it is. Had Steckler put Buford together in a motel room with the insult spewing ball buster from Sexual Vignette 1#, they’d probably have ended up murdering each other, then Steckler would have ended up with a snuff movie on his hands.

Sexual Vignette 4# I don’t know if it was intentional, or if the movie just naturally came out this way, but Peeping Tom has a pattern of following up explosive moments with airless porno padding. Maybe Steckler felt his audience needed space to get their breath, and so beguilingly threw in some regular sex that isn’t fuelled by trauma or dysfunction. This segment is very basic porno loop material, no premise or set up, little dialogue, just a couple balling on a motel room floor. Occasionally there are cutaways to the peeping tom peering through some ugly red drapes. The man is this segment, a bespectacled hippie who resembles Sonny Bono, is familiar from Steckler’s Fire Down Below, where he cries during sex. Steckler lingers over the sight of this guy’s cum as if it were gold dust, and given that so many of his male performers in this film fall at the last hurdle, maybe it is.

Sexual Vignette 5# We’re back to neurotic sex for the grand finale, Steckler’s case study here is a deeply repressed young woman with mommy issues. ‘Cathy’ is partnered up with a pushy guy she met at a party. She lives with her mother, and has brought him back to mum’s place, but just can’t relax. “My mother wouldn’t understand things like that” she complains when his interest in her turns sexual. The guy gets her clothes off, but she is plagued by fears that mum will come home and catch the pair of them “what will I say, what will I do”. The guy tries to pacify her with claims of “live for now, not what might happen”.

The whole scenario feels too real, too convincing, too personal, as if someone was trying to exercise the trauma of coming on to an awkward, prudish girl in the repressive 1950s, only to get caught out by her mother. Steckler’s setting for this scene is for once at odds with what is being played out onscreen, hilariously so. Cathy is meant to be under the thumb of a strict, conservative matriarch, yet Steckler shoots the scene in what looks like a Satanist’s garage. ‘Mum’s place’ has a stone brick wall with obscene looking graffiti on the walls, a suitably Satanic looking red leather couch that Cathy and the guy fuck on, plus the expected occult paraphernalia on the walls. If mum hates sex so much, why has she graffitied what sure looks to be a massive cock on the wall? A bad role model if ever there was one.



Cathy isn’t particularly attractive, but is one of the few genuinely erotic things about this movie, you really buy into her being a sexually repressed woman who was trying to work off some of her inhibitions and issues by appearing in this movie. Cathy is the only person to convince you that she isn’t faking it on film here. There is a vulnerability to her. Out of all of this film’s parade of the sexually hopeless, for some reason she is the one you end up giving a damn about, which makes the mean-spirited edges to her scene even harder to take. The guy turns out to be a smarmy creep who isn’t worthy of her. In order to get her to loosen up he talks her into believing she is his first time, he then wraps his arms around her with his fingers crossed. Naturally, Steckler can’t resist going out on a downer, as horror of horrors, mum returns home, causing the guy to flee with his pants in his hands and for a traumatised Cathy to plead “oh mother, I know you won’t believe this, but I can explain everything”.

Some might feel that Steckler’s masterstroke in Peeping Tom comes during Cathy’s scene, where whilst having sex with her, Cathy’s boyfriend admits he likes to watch porno films, because they are “very instructive”. Leading Cathy to ask “why would you wanna watch somebody do that?” whilst doing just that on film herself. Clearly this is Steckler’s way of throwing the spotlight onto his audience, angrily directing Cathy’s question at them. A reluctant, self-hating pornographer lashing out at his audience. It is a powerful moment for sure, but to me at least, Steckler’s true moment of twisted genius comes right at the end of Peeping Tom. Its night-time and our lonely voyeur is hanging around outside a closed Las Vegas gift shop, he stares sadly into the window. In that window is a mini-Christmas tree and other festive merchandise, at which point it hits you like a train…yes, Peeping Tom is a….FUCKING CHRISTMAS MOVIE!!! That all the misery and dysfunction in the sexual nightmare Steckler has just laid upon us has actually been playing out during the time of peace and goodwill to all men is such a mindfuck to leave your audience to contemplate…. Good grief, Steckler!!

“Sex is to be enjoyed by everyone” claims Steckler’s narrator at the end, absolutely nothing in his film backs this up. VIVA, LAS VEGAS!!!