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Blood Shack (Steckler, 1971)



In Joe Bob Briggs' introduction to Blood Shack, he notes that Ray Dennis Steckler was a fan of both Ed Wood and Michelangelo Antonioni. Despite Wood's reputation (and I admit I'm not in his fanclub), it's easy to see what a filmmaker working with such meager budgets might have admired about Wood. Antonioni was a little harder to grasp, based on my prior experience with Steckler, which felt a lot goofier (and not in a bad way) that anything I'd see from the Italian director. Yet his influence is pretty clear in Blood Shack, a slasher in which characters are murdered after setting foot in a shack in a disputed property in the middle of the desert. If Body Fever could be seen as a lower rent version of Jean-Luc Godard's Made in USA, this is a substantially cruder approximation of parts of Zabriskie Point, bringing to mind the Antonioni parody sequences in The Other Side of the Wind, but without the immaculate craftsmanship or formal daring present in the Welles film or in Antonioni's own.

The previous movies I'd seen from Steckler aren't exactly what I'd call tightly constructed, but they do feel relatively busy and loaded with incident. Blood Shack in contrast is stripped down to the barest of narrative essentials, letting the environment do the heavy lifting in setting the mood. The desert is a hostile, barren and under a scorching sun, casting a primordial atmosphere over the inane proceedings. Every couple of minutes somebody, despite being warned otherwise, steps into the shack and soon after gets murdered by the Chooper, a slim male figure in tights wielding a short sword. The Chooper cuts nowhere near an intimidating figure, but I admit the sight of him in broad daylight, his unabashed goofiness unobscured, did generate a certain frisson, if only because of how incongruous he is to his surroundings. This will not be most people's idea of an effective horror movie, but I'm an admirer of the original Friday the 13th for the way it uses its marginal production values to add to the tension, and I think Steckler kind of does the same thing here, if with less potency. The environment also brings to mind The Hills Have Eyes, but Steckler lacks Craven's ferocity.

Were the movie just a cycle of desert sun and murders in tights, it might have worked on an avant garde level, but Steckler grounds this in a story about a woman who inherits the property and fends off an overly aggressive interested party. There's some reference to a decades-old familial dispute and an Indian burial ground, but as you can probably guess, neither is explored with much interest. The woman is played by Carolyn Brandt, who at the time was Steckler's ex-wife, and she plays the role with a certain magnetism even if there isn't a whole lot to her character. She brings some much needed style to the desert, sporting a number of monochrome outfits as well as a pair of stars-and-stripes pants during the climax, nicely complementing the attempted excitement during that scene. In reliable Z-horror fashion she also gets saddled with a few audience-pandering shower scenes, although these are relatively chaste. I assume the divorce was amicable.

Steckler also pads the runtime with footage of the rodeo and particularly a few kids palling around. I watched the 55-minute "director's cut", which I understand excises 15 minutes of additional rodeo footage. Hope the original audiences liked the rodeo, because they would have gotten a lot more than any sane person might ask for. Am I being unfair to the pleasures of the rodeo? As my primary reference point for them is the rodeo scene from Borat, quite possibly. Now, Steckler likely isn't putting in the kids to highlight their innocence in contrast with the bloodletting (a theme perhaps too sophisticated for this movie's narrative interests), but aside from possibly using the production as an excuse for daycare, why does he spend so much time on them? My guess is that he's secretly a big softie and is happy to fill up the movie with kids playing musical chairs (with one chair!), puppies, calves and horsies (including a pony named Peanuts) because he thinks they're cute. Is that so wrong?