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ODD REVIEWS BY ODDCUBE
Opinions on the Obscure, Off-Beat, and Outdated
The Night Stalker/The Night Strangler A Kolchak Double-FeatureHello, and welcome to my dark little corner of the magazine! Have youever heard the saying “every idiot has an opinion”? Sure ya have! Well, this column(available exclusively here at Abandoned Towers!) is my argument that while every idiotmay have an opinion, that doesn’t mean they should be allowed to share it! …Well, thatwas a much funnier line when I wrote it at 2am. Oh well.If you were watching the ABC network on January 11, 1972, then youwould have witnessed the start of an American television cult phenomenon. Wow, thatsounds good, doesn’t it? Anyway, that was the debut of a made-for-TV movie-of-the-week called; you guessed it;
The Night Stalker 
.It was based on an unpublished (then) story by Jeffrey Grant Rice called
The Kolchak Papers
, and was scripted by Richard Matheson. Kolchak is apparentlyRice’s best-known achievement. But Matheson is a prolific writer of short stories, novels,and screenplays. His stuff has been used for episodes of 
The Twilight Zone
,
 Amazing Stories
,
The Outer Limits
and he wrote many novels, including
Stir of Echoes
,
What  Dreams May Come
, and
 I Am Legend 
, which all became big-time movies.What’s it about? Well, I’ll tell ya. It’s about a rumpled, rapscallion, rovingreporter named Carl Kolchak covering a hot story about a series of peculiar murders inLas Vegas. The fact that the victims were drained of blood leads Kolchak to theorize thatthe killer believes himself to be a vampire. Further evidence, such as super-humanstrength and the apparent invulnerability of the killer (the cops shot him at point-blank range, but he was completely unaffected) eventually brought our hero, and the doubtfulauthorities, to the conclusion that the murderer really WAS a vampire! Of course, theauthorities denied it to the end, and kept a lid on the story. The only one with a deepdesire to get the story printed was Carl himself, and he was blackmailed by the cityofficials to leave town.Kolchak was played by the late, great Darren McGavin, a versatile veteranof the stage and screens big and small. McGavin boasts a LONG list of credits on theInternational Movie Database (IMDB.com), when added to his stage credits he is creditedwith over two hundred performances. He’s perhaps best known as Carl Kolchak, but he’salso remembered as Ralphie’s Old Man in
 A Christmas Story
. He also ended up playingthe father of Candace Bergen’s titular character,
Murphy Brown
.The newspaper editor Kolchak worked for was the long-suffering Tony Vincenzo(the only other character to appear through every incarnation of the series), played bySimon Oakland. Did you know that he actually started his career as a violinist before he became an actor? I didn’t either! But he did become an actor and ended playing a lot of tough guys. You might remember him best as Dr. Fred Richmond in
 Psycho
, or as Lt.Schrank in
West Side Story
.Barry Atwater, another character actor who got to be in…just aboutEVERYthing for one or two episodes, played Janos Skorzeny, the vampire. Hey, here’s afunny little story I found… Between shooting scenes, Atwater was passing through one of 
 
the casinos in full costume—complete with pasty complexion, fangs, cape, and red eyes —and no one even looked at him twice.Fact: famous faces and guest stars abound throughout the entire series, a traditionthat began with
The Night Stalker 
. Members of the supporting cast in that first movieinclude veteran character actor, Claude Akins; Larry Linville (before playing the role of Major Frank Burns in
M*A*S*H 
); and Elisha Cook Jr., probably best known as SidneyGreenstreet’s gunsyl, Wilmer Cook, in
The Maltese Falcon
. See? This is legitimate B-movie stuff!The American viewing public knew it, too. On January 11, 1972,
The Night Stalker 
was the highest-rating made-for-TV movie ever. This fact prompted ABC toapproach producer Dan Curtis and screenwriter Richard Matheson to request a sequel.Almost exactly one year later, on January 16, 1973, ABC aired that sequel,
The Night Strangler 
. This time, Kolchak is up in Seattle. He runs into Tony Vincenzo at aneighborhood bar and gets a new job at a new paper thanks to his old boss. And wouldn’tyou know it? He gets hired just in time to cover a story about a new series of weirdmurders!These murders also contain puncture marks on the victims’ necks, but thistime it’s a single puncture at the base of the skull and only a few cc’s of blood is missing.This time his weird murderer is no vampire, but a mere mortal man. Well, maybe not“mere mortal”. Richard Anderson, perhaps best-known as Oscar Goldman on
The SixMillion Dollar Man
AND
The Bionic Woman
(he’s also Chief Engineer Quinn in cult sci-fi classic
 Forbidden Planet 
), plays a Civil War doctor named Dr. Richard Malcolm, whohas been using alchemy to generate an elixir to restore his youth and prolong his life.Unfortunately, his formula is not perfect, and its affects wear off, causing him to harvest blood from his victims every twenty-one years. Now, it seems to me that in the first movie, Kolchak was more cynical andreluctant to believe the supernatural truth about the murderer at large. He kept saying “themurderer is a wacko who
thinks
he’s a vampire, and you have to treat him like one cuzthat’s the only way you’ll catch him!” I don’t think he really believed it until he saw themurderer run away unaffected after police shot him at point-blank range. However, in thesecond film, he seems ready to believe that these five weird murders were committed bythe same man responsible for similar killings 21 years earlier…and five more 21 years before that…and five more another 21 years before that… Of course, I guess after thetraumatic events of the first movie he should be more open to such ideas. Plus, I think hewas expecting another vampire.This movie had some famous faces, too. I mean, besides RichardAnderson. Let’s see, Margaret Hamilton, uh, you know, the Wicked Witch of the Westfrom
The Wizard of Oz 
, plays a college professor. The great John Carradine plays the guywho owns the paper Kolchak and Vincenzo work for. Oh yeah, and Al Lewis—you know,Grandpa Munster—plays an old tramp who squats in the Seattle underground. GeorgeTobias, who played neighbor Abner Kravitz on
 Bewitched 
, had filmed some scenes as anolder reporter who covered a similar story back in the 30s, but all his scenes got cut fromthe final production, but are supposed to be in the deleted scenes section of the disk (notthe one I have, though).Of course the strange events of this movie are also suppressed by theauthorities. This time Kolchak AND Vincenzo get fired and are en route to New York 
 
with Kolchak’s romantic interest du jour. This second feature was also popular, and athird movie was planned by producer Curtis and screenwriter Matheson to complete the“Trilogy of Terror”. However there are conflicting suggestions of the subject of that thirdinstallment. Imdb.com suggests the third movie would take place in New York City,where Kolchak would find that Janos Skorzeny was not dead, and attacking women onceagain. But according to Wikipedia, the third movie was meant to be titled
The Night  Killers
, about a group of murderous android replicas. But the third movie never got made.Why not? Well, I’ll tell ya.Fact: The two Kolchak movies did so well that the network wanted to turnit into a weekly series. The series became a reality and premiered in September of 1974,still starring Darren McGavin and Simon Oakland. Sadly, the series only lasted a singleseason. Happily, its influence is long-lasting and far-reaching. The series is reported to bea direct inspiration on the creators of 
The X-Files
and
The Dresden Files
, and certainechoes of Kolchak could be detected in the short-lived
 Eerie, Indiana
and the still-running
Supernatural.
 And Kolchak still lives on. The cultish fan following was so strong thatMark Dawidziak released
 Night Stalking: A 20th Anniversary "Night Stalker" Companion
in 1991. In 1994, he worked with Kolchak’s creator, Jeff Rice, to produce the novel
Grave Secrets
 —the first new material since the end of the original series. In 2003,Dawidziak worked with Matheson to produce
 Richard Matheson's Kolchak Scripts
,containing the scripts for these original movies. Also in 2003, Moonstone Books releaseda Kolchak comic book that was successful enough to grow into a bi-monthly magazineand series of graphic novels that continues on today.In 2005, ABC decided to remake the series. Well, there were certain problems with that, as they only retained the rights to the first two movies and could notuse the better-remembered stable of characters from the series. The new series also had adifferent tone, and was aimed at younger viewers instead of the older ones who would beinterested for nostalgic reasons. The new series, called
 Night Stalker 
, starred StuartTownsend (uh, I know him as Dorian Gray in that lousy
 League of ExtraordinaryGentlemen
movie). It only lasted for ten episodes before it got canned. The show itself wasn’t bad, but it would have been better if he wasn’t supposed to be Kolchak. Thatcaused certain expectations, I think, that simply weren’t met.But in 2006 Moonstone Books released an anthology of Kolchak shortstories. It was called
The Night Stalker Chronicles
and boasted contributors such as Peter David, Richard Dean Starr, and Max Allan Collins. It was successful enough that theyreleased a second collection,
 Kolchak: the Night Stalker Casebook 
, with stories by P. N.Elrod, Christopher Golden, and Elaine Bergstrom, among others.And to think, it all started with one cynical reporter chasing after avampire in 1970’s Las Vegas. Those first two movies,
The Night Stalker 
and
The Night Strangler 
are available on DVD (so is the complete original series). In fact, I’ve got thisspecial double-feature two-sided disk. You could buy it at Amazon (among other places),you can rent it from Netflix, you can see a clip or two on YouTube (but most of the clipsseem to be from the series).Anyway, if you’re a Kolchak fan, I can’t stress enough that these are amust-see. If you’re a fan of cheesy, corny old-school horror flicks, you would totally lovethese. And if you don’t like cheese, or even corn, well…I guess you’re just outta luck.
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