A lone woman walks down the Los Angeles streets late at night until she becomes aware of footsteps following her. She quickens her pace, but the man in pursuit becomes two men, and she breaks into a run, escaping down any alleyway she can find until she is cornered in a dead end, where yet another thug jumps out at her from the garbage. These three men proceed to rough her up and steal her purse, gloating over the money they now have as the woman is left to pick herself up alone: this is the gang who have been terrorising the city, and they are not going to stop until they meet their match. Their big mistake is to victimise Cee Bee Beaumont (Carolyn Brandt), for she is the girlfriend of singing star Lonnie Lord (Ron Haydock)...
For low budget auteur Ray Dennis Steckler, his most famous film is either the caveman epic Eegah, which he didn't direct, or his incredibly lengthily titled The Incredibly Strange Creatures who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, if such works can be classified as "famous" - maybe notorious would be a better word. As for the man himself, he felt his best film was this, which should have been called Rat Pfink and Boo Boo but somewhere along the line the "and" was altered and the title which makes no sense unless you had seen the movie was what it bore in the opening credits. He had planned this as a straightforward thriller, or as straightforward as Steckler could make it at any rate, but it didn't turn out that way.
Certainly all the hallmarks of a typical effort from this man were here, with the rather more explicit violence a mainstream movie of the sixties would have exhibited, the recurring theme of damsels in distress, and the habit of giving his friends roles in the production - then-wife Carolyn Brandt was a given in these - but halfway through he realised he was on a hiding to nothing and what material he had simply was not working out. For that reason around the midpoint everything that has been to all intents and purposes a serious thriller with musical interludes courtesy of Haydock who was an aspiring rock 'n' roll star (he never made it, dying in a hitchhiking accident in the seventies) is transformed into a goofy comedy apparently spoofing the then-current Batman television show.
Though according to Steckler, he was indeed paying tribute to the Caped Crusader, only not the Adam West version, for he was nostalgic for the forties serial which had made such an impression on him as a small child. Whatever, there was a sense that Steckler, who made no secret of the fact much of his endeavours were improvised, had Lonnie and Cee Bee's gardener Titus (Titus Moede) teaming up after she is kidnapped by the baddies who have demanded a ransom. They do this by suddenly standing up, walking into a closet, scrabbling around a bit then emerging in makeshift costume as two crimefighters, Rat Pfink (Haydock) and Boo Boo (Moede): "Remember, we have only one weakness!" "What's that?" "Bullets!" Now that's sorted out, the chase is on.
Our gallant heroes arrive at the point where the cash is meant to be dropped off, and promptly knock their contact into a dumpster. They then head off in pursuit of the gang, starting with a long fistfight in somebody's back garden, Steckler shooting wherever he could regardless of how cheap it looked, and then they hit the highway in a motorbike and sidecar (which Rat Pfink strikes noble poses in as they zoom along), after the the villains who have Cee Bee with them. And then there's the gorilla... Perhaps the weirdest thing about this was if you'd dispensed with the opening half, this would be ideal for kids of the day, but the attacks are performed with such gusto (even later on, for that matter) that it remains inappropriate. Cee Bee is alerted to the threat against her by a nuisance caller on the phone, scenes inspired by real life when she was menaced whenever husband Ray left their apartment (don't worry, they caught the pervert), but even that is at odds with the wackiness to come. And yet, there is something about this, its downright, rambling oddity, that keeps it watchable.
