In the days of public executions, criminals would often attempt to entertain their regrettable audiences with witticisms – ironic commentary on their predicament, the monarchy, or anything else they could summon to distract themselves from the gravity and finality of what the people had gathered there to observe. However successful those individuals may have been at their newfound vocation, however, their efforts were inevitably punctuated by the collapse of the scaffolding underneath, providing the barb in the modern-day term derived from this bit of history, "gallows humor," suggestive of any attempt to make light of an untoward circumstance but especially profound in the case of those similarly striving to deceive themselves in the face of certain doom.

So it’s evocative of something when, toward the end of Tony Crechales’s typically bitchy, wisecracking and sardonic low-budget 1971 drive-in melodrama Point of Terror, a comic-oaf detective comes in to deliver a haphazard exoneration of the suspects in a homicide case moments before the actual author of the woman’s death is called away from his honeymoon to his warranted, yet wholly unexpected and violent, comeuppance.

The cop throws into relief the futility of most of the rest of the cast in trying to joke their way out of their own tragic teleology, a last, pathetic attempt at levity before the final pull of the lever offstage.

That this detective is played, however, by Crechales’s co-screenwriter, Ernest Charles, adds an extra layer of mischief to the setup, suggesting it as an in-joke on the part of the whole production company in excuse for its own loosely and at times seemingly arbitrarily plotted and executed story, an indication that they don’t take themselves as seriously as their other characters do, and so, by extension, neither should we. Which only makes the whammy of the double-

surprise ending that much more resonant – especially so when the TV print of the film takes its Mobius-strip effect one step further and replays itself beginning to end – twice – resolving with the same post-credits image that it started with, tight focus on a man’s screaming mouth. As this ending offers a metaphor for the reiterative nature of all of Crechales’s work, the literal self-reflexion here only underscores the bitter lesson of his characters’ sarcastic relations, the films’jokey surfaces doing little to allay the hopelessness always at their core and eternally willing out in the end.

Had he been a director instead of a screenwriter, Crechales would have been known for one of the wildest, most unbridled bodies of work around at the time, peopled by as unique a collection of has-beens, never-weres and fringe-dwellers – with the occasional serious professional thrown in for added contrast – as gravitated to any one "movie" person this side of John Waters. Instead he has gone largely unrecognized, despite having worked with an equally eclectic array of directors including veteran Reginald Le Borg, regional filmmaker William Grefé, full-time character actor Alex Nicol, future Angel director Robert O’Neil, and former experimental filmmaker Curtis Harrington and his producing partner, George Edwards. Through all of these interpreters, however, Crechales’ voice came through more consistently than many more celebrated writers, a giddying amalgamation of the campy,

trashy, melodramatic, naïve, undisciplined, bitter, futile and tragic, each story the chronicle of a loser who somehow manages to fall from rock bottom, and to do it again and again and again.

With one peculiar exception, 1980’s The Great Skycopter Rescue, a project on which he is third-billed and probably acted as little more than a dialogue fluffer, Crechales’ eight features produced between 1970 and 1980 all had one thing in common: a script. Working only minor variations from plot to plot, each scenario functioned as a trap to contain its protagonist in his or her own constricted universe, resulting in a fugue state amplified by the real-life reiteration

of so many actors, character types and plot devices across film after film in this brief cycle as though all were part of some cosmic jest carried through in the screenwriter’s own recurring-nightmare world. Individually, the films may fail to register as anything other than overly contrived trash, but watched serially they gain the power to confound the viewer as well as their characters through their echo-chamber determinism until the only viable response is the same insensible scream his protagonists are so often driven toward.

The format is familiar: a character suffering some trauma in the past becomes tangled in an often libidinous web of murder and deceit in efforts to break free from an increasingly hopeless situation, only to find defeat on the verge of transcendence. From the former abortion doctor of 1970’s Blood Mania who can’t outrun his past, to the not-untalented balladeer of Point of Terror the following year whose instincts drive him deeper and deeper into calamity; from the lower-class plotters of 1972’s House of Terror undone by somebody even lower on the social ladder than themselves, to the similarly doomed Diaboliques-style schemers who fail to outwit their nitwit cop-nemesis in the same year’s Psycho Sisters (alternatively titled So Evil My Sister and, incredibly, remade 14 years later as Distortions); from the unwilling rapist of the next year’s The Killing Kind whose overattentive mother guarantees he’ll never even recognize his imbalance let alone rise above it, to the patricidal 12-year-old of 1974’s Impulse who grows up to be a gigolo and con-man bettered in the end by a preadolescent girl, and the librarian-daughter of 1980’s career-postscript The Attic who realizes too late why her fiancé disappeared without a trace so many years before – the dramatis personæ of Crechales’ world represent as consistent, and doomed, a brood as either the least imaginative or most single-minded personality ever produced.

You pretty much know in the first few minutes of a Crechales film that, like its protagonists, it’s never quite going to transcend its limitations, but that’s the point of watching, anyway. Even such gestures at shock, wit or titillation the films inevitably make are likely to disappoint because, you understand, though thrills are what they promise or

that to which they earnestly aspire, excitement may still be not exactly the point. The point is simply telling a story no matter how many times it has been told before, because somewhere in there is something meaningful about the life of the person telling it, and maybe of the viewer as well.

Point of Terror stands out, perhaps, from the prismatic pack for its position as not the first in the series but far from the last, a signal that though things are happening because of preceding situations they will not easily be resolved here or in the episodes to follow. It doesn’t start at the point of terror, but that’s where it’s headed and where it will stay for a good long time, the ultimate laugh

construction explicit in Point and implicit in most all of the rest. Finally, House’s elision of the traditional "40 Years Later" subtitle after its introductory double murder suggests that, in all circumstances, the action is no more "past" than what follows it, existing instead in archetypal – "vertical" – time, what Julia Kristeva terms the "always-already" condition of Parousia. No matter the scenario, the message time and time again is that this past is, as Delmore Schwartz has said, "inevitable," the present a stepping-stone to oblivion and an exercise in humiliation along the way.

In its double-entendre title, Point of Terror evokes this condition of

fitting, in that sex in a Crechales film is more often than not a losing proposition between in most cases an innocent and either a psycho, criminal, adulterer or family member when not entirely solo. More than anything, what triggers this horrific response is a revelation, a recognition by the self of the Self and what it has become.

The scream that wakes Trelos on the beach at the beginning of Point may be taken as the birth-cry of a child, its closing reiteration on his shooting his death-rattle. (Here the film bears passing resemblance to another low-budget exercise in futility, 1960’s all but forgotten Blast of Silence.) In the Elvisoid

performance that prefaces his drama he’s seen in a heavily fringed outfit that might be taken as angelic were it not bright red and set off by not a heavenly white curtain but the flaming yellow one behind him, suggesting his as a hellborn soul delivered into the world full of ambitions and a little talent but lacking that crucial something that would help him find his place. Naturally, the first person he should see on this beach – just off the evolutionary ocean which as long as Time has represented the womb and the unconscious, both of which he’s just emerged from – should be a woman, her buxom figure and married status signaling the Mother who, no surprise, owns

that stretch of land and informs him he is trespassing. That they will commence a relationship is inevitable – inescapable, even, when his girlfriend informs him She is Andrea Hilliard, wife of National Records honcho Martin Hilliard. Besides the oedipal implication of Andrea’s admonition to him, however, is the sense that he is out of his league in such company, a loser in the land of accomplishment, which sense will only bring him down no matter how much backing and support she gives him as their affair escalates.

It is this same beach on which the mama’s boy lead of Killing began his film-life, and where the scheming half of Sisters similarly awakes to meet her nemesis. It gets translated later into Andrea’s pool as well as those of Mania,

House and Killing, and transfigured again into the car wash and aquarium of Impulse, whose first contemporary murder takes place beside a lake. The implication in each is of a corrupt Eden representing

the characters’soul, which most never get very far away from; likewise the oppressive sexual demands of their proprietresses, try as their male prey might to escape them.

Overseeing Tony and Andrea from his Olympian home above this beach is the scowling, wheelchair-bound Martin, an impotent god to match the similarly crippled and sardonic fathers of Mania, Killing and Attic. (House’s father figure also winds up incapacitated as well as a result of a botched attempt on his life.) These patriarchs’ conspicuous absence in each of the other films is then compensated by the presence of a smothering mother, whether real, as in

Killing, or figurative, as in Impulse, Mania and Point. Freudian concerns aside, what this recommends is a character insecure in his relation to his own ego, as his own consciousness, and drawn instead to the oceanic mother-figure of the unconscious, yielding in every circumstance dissolution and, ultimately, self-destruction. Compare this with Bert Gordon and George Worthing Yates’s remarkably similar Tormented scenario from

1960, whose rising jazz pianist is fatefully bound to a voluptuous woman from the past who disrupts his current relationship and finally drags him into the deeps along with her. Mania, the blueprint for Point in many aspects, also throws in Gordon/Yates’s blackmailer for good measure.

Tony, like so many Crechales protagonists, comes across as a likable though disadvantaged sort who simply makes bad choices in his own self-interest, again and again and again. After his come-on to Andrea on the beach, it’s disorienting to find he has a girlfriend already, Sally, and a perfectly sympathetic one to boot; that she is dumped so unceremoniously for the opportunity the married woman

presents is a baffling character fluke even in light of the backstory proffered in his long reminiscence while resting his head on her lap. Again, this pietà is a common Crechales setup, recurring from Mania and later reenacted in House, Killing and Attic as well, suggesting the woman’s sex as the resting-place for dreams (flashback to the

symbol of the consciousness within. Since it is here also that the film begins, we assume that he has in a sense never left this place, he still pretty much a clueless young boy stranded in a rational, civilized world. Were he female, the intrusion of the bully on this scene after the contents of his "box" would signify or even explicitly lead to a rape. (Mania also carries hints of homosexual activity in the past, with a similarly thieving male in the main character’s history who refuses to stay there; he is also a feature of Impulse in the form of Harold Sakata’s Karate Pete and appears in less threatening form in Sisters’ handyman Woody, and though the immediate victim of House’s Man from the Past is female, his ultimate target is her sardonic sugardaddy, Emmett Kramer.) As it is, you could still draw

heightened by the fact that they wind up skinny-dipping, the union with this ocean-mother (as the TV print’s repeated cuts to the ocean itself attest) a new beginning while bad-daddy Martin ostensibly sleeps inside. On Tony’s departure, however, Martin emerges to taunt his wife with recollections of her murder of his first wife, recasting Andrea as less of a mother-figure than a not-the-mother, a psychological link for the young boy between his own mother-attachment and the next stage in his sexual maturity, relation with a wholly separate and individual lover. In the fashion of the previous Crechales-Carpenter collaboration Mania, this love appears in the form of Martin’s daughter Helayne (as Mania’s sister Gail), come to attend the reading of her

father’s will after Andrea responds to his baiting by drowning him in the pool. The drama set in motion by the bully taking Tony’s money by the sea is then ostensibly resolved by Andrea, Tony’s dream-agent, who eliminates the bully’s adult equivalent in another body of water, yielding the vast sums to which Tony will finally have

more generous since Mania, where the vast majority of the fortune went to the good daughter, suggesting an optimistic first-movie worldview given more to redemption than the later morass of self-contempt. No matter the inclination, the outcome is always the same.)

Conveniently, Andrea chooses to leave on business so Tony and Helayne can get to know each other better, leaving in her stead her randy though homely truthtelling galpal Fran, played by Mania’s similar wallflower, Leslie Simms. (The character, an amped-up revision of Mania’s sober crypto-lesbian Kate Lucas, would return again relatively intact in Impulse’s likewise bibulous and

single Marstow.) Her role as further psychological steppingstone is clear when she passes out on a typical drunk and is chastely put to bed by the hero, she both a non-threatening Sexual Mother figure and the last vestige of conscience (a trait shared with her other incarnations) or consciousness to bow out before Tony can commune with his inmost erotic ideal, whom he meets on returning from bedding Fran down, as a sort of reward for his virtuousness.

Tony’s wooing of Helayne unfolds in another trademark Crechales device, the whirlwind romance that may be either earnest courtship or self-interested maneuvering. This overfamiliar montage of horseback riding, beachcombing and candlelit dinner is merely trite, here; it gains an almost pathological dimension when added to

Mania’s Renaissance Fayre, House’s Vegas honeymoon, Killing’s amusement-park reminiscence w/ Mom, Impulse’s zoo trip, and the park frolic recorded in Attic’s home movies. The episodes are so bland and rote, in fact, as to seem imagined by a child or by the colorless characters themselves, as though the idea of healthy, original man-and-woman relations, where they begin and how they develop, were alien to all involved and the heaven the couple momentarily get to enjoy as dull as the hell his characters normally inhabit.

True to fashion, though, Tony’s happiness is almost immediately quashed, first by news that Sally is pregnant, then by the unexpected return of an understandably

miffed Andrea. The fact of his three lovers suggests three possible futures for Trelos as well, after the fashion of the three mythological Fates: firstly, the hell of Andrea’s companionship and a success fraught with indebtedness and guilt; next, the heaven of marriage to Helayne yielding the means to achieve his own breakout; finally, the mundane reality of life with Sally and a career of domesticity and abandoned hopes. It’s a credit to the honesty of the low-budget filmmaker that only the latter course proves "fruitful," as reinforced when Andrea informs him that, according to Martin’s will (that is, heavenly design, and Tony’s own internal navigation), her stepdaughter will be

disinherited for marrying before age 25: Tony’s ascension is impossible, therefore, until he himself possesses the readiness and maturity to achieve it on his own. Even flinging Andrea off the cliff by the side of the pool won’t silence the self-doubt she represents, however: she dies clinging to him, mocking his assertions of self-sufficiency.

It’s a further mark of filmmaker truthfulness that no matter how lenient the makeshift conscience (in the form of Charles’s incompetent cop) may be, the characters themselves can’t forgive themselves so easily. In the very next scene, Tony and Helayne’s ascension at an airport is thwarted when a call call from an

unspecified party interrupts their packing in the caring company of Fran, who has herself apparently forgiven Tony for the homicide of her best friend – to lure Tony away to his comeuppance at the hand, and gun, of Sally, her summons like an interior voice that won’t let him get away with it. The emotional gravity of the packing scene is literalized when he hits the ground here, the bullets in his belly like the weight in Sally’s own finally felling him outside her apartment, his "gut" bringing him back down to earth even as his head is trying to ascend. Sally’s fecund nighttime garden where he makes his last bed sounds the final ironic note to the drama, contrasting as it does the barren, sunlit beach where Tony first met Andrea, a comparison drawn tight when the closing camera zooms in on the same silent scream that awoke him 90 minutes earlier.

When the TV version tailspins into its hectic recap at this finale (the theatrical version satisfies itself with Tony merely waking up back at the beginning of his movie) it’s just another delaying tactic, however, which Crechales managed to parlay into an entire career afterwards. On the surface just another freakout ’70s ending post-Blow Up, this coda in either form gains in force as a harbinger of the reiterations to come in the screenwriter’s work, creating a feedback effect indicating the futility of fighting. By the end of his next feature, House of Terror, the steamroom screams of its last-remaining schemer are answered by the laughter of her executioner, and it could be Crechales himself musing over the Skinner-box fate of his own subjects – or equally likely the mockery of still another who holds her own lever in hand, the one who always has the last laugh and who eventually must have pulled the trapdoor on Crechales, too. Similarly, it’s the weakest link in Sisters who winds up pushing her now-catatonic nemesis around, the alternately tragic and absurd psychos of his next two features ending up likewise

fetal-position, the latter, William Shatner’s Impulse character, impaled on the same instrument with which he’d killed his own father at the other end of his story, proving closure no better an object than frustration.

The syndrome would find its resolution at last with Crechales’s final feature, when The Attic’s old-maid protagonist confronts the corpse of her idealistic world-view in the form of her long-dead fiancé, associated in the movie’s opening moments with film itself. Counter to Point, however, Attic begins not

with some bombastic dream of glories to come, but with a woman’s whimpering as she lay slowly draining her life away watching Super 8’s of herself and her lost hope. There’s plenty of wisecracking to be had all the same in the bickering between its librarian main character, Louise (picked up wholesale from Luana Anders’ similar, like-named role in Killing), and her again repressive father, whose thwarting of her marriage denies her the same ascendance denied every character in a Crechales film until the anomalous Skycopter; but there’s pathos as well, and lots of it. And though the comedy again tends to wither on screen, the grief in the film’s closing moments is palpable, its personal investment on the part of Crechales, director Edwards, and actress Carrie Snodgress convincing.

Crechales’s voice has yet to be heard again in any meaningful context, though his message continues to resonate, for, while Point’s gags, as any others in his body of work, may fall flat, the effect of his gallows humor still cuts deep. While some may deride his films for their obvious shortcomings, as the filmmakers themselves may invite us to do, this writer, at least, takes them very seriously, for he knows how derisive laughter now, as in the days of public executions, can always be followed by the snap of the scaffolding beneath us.

It is, again, the fools who can tell us much about ourselves; even the doomed ones.