The Night Stalker

Carl Kolchak was the brainchild of actor Darren McGavin, who was a fixture of television and movies for decades, and who brought to the role a peculiar life that has outlived the short-lived series spawned by this initial, wildly popular television movie.

1973 was a very different era than the one in which we currently live--hell, you may even go so far as to say it was an entirely different world. To see McGavin carry around a little leather box with a speaker built into it--his modern "gear" for, RECORDING HIS VOICE (an astounding technological achievement in the early 1970s) is to suppress a chuckle or a guffaw--the damn thing looks like it could be beneath a glass case in a museum. Likewise, a television character such as Kolchak, a big city crime reporter cum creepily middle-aged lothario who gets all the fly skimmies (to quote those redoubtable modern poets, The Beastie Boys) would, most likely, see him "canceled," vampire killer or not.

Here, he goes toe-to-toe with Simon Oakland. ("Tony Vincenzo", his big-city newspaper editor who, when not dressing down Robert Conrad in "Baa Baa Black Sheep," was tasked with doing the same to poor Carl, who is just trying to find a vampire and drive a wooden stake through his heart. Why can't a fellow understand that?) Oakland, looking as if he's a man on the edge of a myocardial infarction, informs the white-suited, straw-hat-and-white-shoe-wearing, Kolchak that, under no circumstances, is he to stick his over-eager, "let-me-at-'em" proboscis into these so-called "vampire killings." Which, by the by, aren't vampire killings at all, no siree!

Claude "The OTHER Andy Griffith" Akins (as a Sherriff "Warren A. Butcher," who struts around in a cowboy hat) ALSO has it in for Kolchak, as does D.A. "Tom Paine" (!), played by Kent Smith. Rounding out the cast is Elisha Cook Jr., a character actor who, to borrow a quip from the quotable late Jack Nance, played a "human doorstop" in The House on Haunted Hill (Nance was commenting on his own role in David Lynch's ill-fated adaptation of Dune from 1984).

Kolchak's girlfriend Gail (Carol Lynley) convinces him to peer into the folklore of vampires, and he does so, getting an old "folklore of vampires" book and checking out that folklore, because folklore when so checked out, WILL help you in tracking down and killing vampires. I guar-an-tee it, babe!

So anyway, a blood bank gets robbed and this dude, Skorzeny (Barry Atwater) gets all shot up, and the cops realize he doesn't look a day over forty-eight besides the fact that he's near seventy; AND he's Eastern European. (This last sends up red flags in the minds of aficionados of vampire and werewolf tales. The name "Skorzeny" was, incidentally, borrowed for the name of Chuck Connors' character in the short-lived but mostly excellent late 1980's FOX series "Werewolf," starring John J. York as a sort of hirsute Bruce Banner.)

Cult Films and Midnight Movies

"From High Art to Low Trash" Vol 1

By

Tom Baker

These shows always seem to point to Eastern Europeans as being "creepy" and weird and potential vampires and werewolves. Someone ought to inform the SPLC.

At any rate, the climactic ending involves scenes that would be replayed in the movie Fright Night (1984) ten years later. (Gail, curiously, was "forced to leave Las Vegas," as an "undesirable element" by the authorities, a power that I always assumed was outside the purview of law enforcement.) McGavin's performance is rip-roaring and full of enthusiasm; he comes across as infectiously eager, committed; if not particularly modern in outlook; he's got a Broadway show countenance and a will to believe when it comes to stalking the undead.

Much of The Night Stalker is now a cliche to the point of kitsch, but it is still a great film. Sunup or sundown (more appropriately perhaps, sunDOWN) you'll enjoy it.

As Claude Akins might have said, "I guar-an-tee!"

Note. Chris Carter, the creator of the "X-Files," has pointed to "Kolchak" as being one of his chief inspirations. I would have to counter that just so far as the sheer tone of the show, "Werewolf" seems the more likely culprit here. But everything builds on something else, one supposes.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker" (TV - 1972) Trailer original