For many years I regarded The Alien Encounters (1979) as some fuzzy childhood hallucination until I finally found a PAL VHS tape from Australia on eBay in 2013 and could finally confirm that this strange film actually did exist--but that's a subject for another post. An earlier film written and directed by the same nigh forgotten low-budget auteur James T. Flocker was not as hard to find: some poor, demented soul has recently uploaded a copy of the 1977 film Ghosts That Still Walk on YouTube.
If you're unfamiliar with this flick, here's a fan made trailer to give you a taste of just what to expect:
The capsule review in John Stanley's Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again (Fourth revised version) reads:
GHOSTS THAT STILL WALK (1977). Young boy is possessed by an Indian medicine man spirit in this low-budget pseudodocumentary about ghosts and spirits. It's terribly disjointed and hard to follow but does have one exciting sequence in which an elderly couple traveling in a rec vehicle is attacked by boulders rolling across the desert. Otherwise, tedious going. And boring. Written-directed by James T. Flocker. (VCI: United)Most people that recall seeing Ghosts That Still Walk on a late night or Saturday afternoon UHF airing in the late '70s or early '80s usually only remember that "one exciting sequence" of rolling boulders in the desert inexplicably attacking a couple of senior citizens in an RV. This unnervingly bizarre action sequence is probably the second greatest chase scene involving a motor home in cinematic history, topped only by well, really the entirety of Race with the Devil (1975); it gradually builds to a point of High Strangeness to create an overwhelmingly oppressive mood of true otherworldly alien-ness impinging on the normal waking world, as giant square shaped boulders--seemingly alive and with malicious intent--bear down on the RV like a galloping herd of mammoth antediluvian beasts, a tableau certainly never witnessed by a sane mind before or since, unless in the fevered phantasies of some deranged eater of hashish.
Another portion of the film involves a teenage boy's astral projection and his mommy's mummy (don't ask) and a few scenes of transcendent weirdness could be compared to a primitivist version of cult film maker David Lynch in the use of light and sound, sharing Lynch's predilection for sharp crackling sound bursts of electrical current and bright stroboscopic flashes of light as signifiers for a rent in the fabric of everyday reality. These fleeting peeks of otherworldliness are contrasted with stultifyingly mundane scenes of middle class suburban normality, presaging the settings typical of late '70s to mid '80s Steven Spielberg classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Poltergeist, Gremlins, Back to the Future, or The Goonies that take place in one version or another of Spielburbia, USA.
That's not to say that Ghosts That Still Walk is by ANY stretch of the imagination as inherently "good" or well made as any one of those films, but it is as fascinatingly bizarre and eminently watchable as anything created by the man-god Ed Wood and does deserve to be seen again on DVD or Blu-ray disc by any fan of good old fashioned low budget schlock. Just file it under: What the Flocker?
