Kolchak - The Night Stalker

Stalk On
The Wild Side

Kolchak -
The Night Stalker
USA 1974/75
Universal/Kino Lorber
Blu Ray Zone A

Okay, so after revisiting the two TV movies The Night Stalker (reviewed here), based on Jeff Rice’s The Kolchak Papers and The Night Strangler (reviewed here), it was time to take another look at the next chapter of the Kolchak legacy, the show which spun off from those two movies, Kolchak The Night Stalker. Despite the ratings smash of those first two TV movie sucker punches, the regular show only lasted 20 episodes (of around 50 minutes each) before being cancelled, for reasons I’ll get into later.

It was, however, a great show and it certainly had a much longer lasting legacy in TV history than you would expect for a show cancelled before it had even finished its first season. A number of horror themed TV shows of modern times may not have been around without this one and, as I may have mentioned before, The X Files started off with Chris Carter trying to make a new Kolchak series and then going down the Mulder and Scully route when the rights negotiations came to nothing (from what I remember). Similarly, once The X Files had gotten bigger, McGavin refused to reprise the role of Kolchak for the show but did agree to play a different character for a couple of episodes, not to mention turning up as Frank Black’s father in an episode of sister show Millennium for Carter.

Like they did The X Files, decades later, many people refer to Kolchak The Night Stalker as being a ‘monster of the week’ show in an almost derogatory manner and, yeah, okay it’s guilty as charged and is, in some ways, quite formulaic, with Kolchak stumbling onto some supernatural entity and pursuing it to get another unsaleable and unprintable story for his editor... but that doesn’t mean to say the show wasn’t any good. Quite the opposite in fact... which is why it was so influential decades later, with directors and creators who remembered watching it in their youth. Heck, future blockbuster writer and director Rob Zemeckis even sold his first script to the show... although I don’t think the episode in question, Chopper, about a vengeful, headless Hells Angel biker cutting people down with a sword, is one of the better entries in the series, to be honest.

The show kept the two main actors from the show, of course... so we have Darren McGavin as the incomparable Carl Kolchak, in his trademark seersucker jacket and straw hat, along with the wonderful Simon Oakland as his shouty, cynical and much put upon boss, Tony Vincenzo. McGavin was also unofficially co-producing the show on set, which led to friction with the two main producers on the series, one after the other. We also have, after a little while, a couple of other regulars on the show. These are Jack Grinnage as the effeminate, uptight Ron Updyke and Ruth McDevitt as Emily Cowes, or Miss Emily as she was known on the show.

Miss Emily and her character is something of an interesting wrinkle in the show in that she is a sign of the ever evolving nature of the scripts and she has an interesting development. Miss Emily is the elderly lady on the team at the INS (Independent News Service) where Kolchak now works and is the newspaper’s agony aunt, as well as crossword puzzle maker. Now, she is absent and on vacation for the early episodes but talked about as Miss Emily. And in the first episode, Ruth McDevitt plays one of the readers who sends in for advice to that character (leading to Carl going to interview her as she seems to have a clue to something he’s working on). Later, in episode five, the actress would be back as Miss Emily but, her character name is Edith Cowles. In the sixth episode she’s finally called Miss Emily properly, although for that episode she’s still called Edith Cowles on the end credits, for some reason.

Another, similar sign that the show may have had a rushed development was the fact that the title changed a little into the series. For the first four episodes, it’s only called The Night Stalker (like the original movie) before switching to Kolchak The Night Stalker in episode five. So, yeah, big changes were obviously being made while the show was shooting and in post... it certainly shows.

The episodes are all quite fun though and, for a ‘monster of the week’ show, there were actually quite a lot of different kinds of threats and mysteries for Kolchak to dig into without getting boring... although, I can see that future seasons of the show, if they’d gone ahead, may have gotten very similar, to be sure. So we have a werewolf episode, a zombie episode, a Jack The Ripper episode, a Rakshasa episode, an Alien episode and various other quirky things such as Aztec mummies, witches, sentient suits of armour, a Frankensteinien robot and even a youth killer. There’s also a vampire in a sideways sequel, in episode four, to the original The Night Stalker movie... with one of the vampire’s victims from that occasion returning to bring a new toothy threat near the vicinity of Las Vegas.

Likewise, there are a number of guest stars and a fair few ‘before they got famous’ parts scattered liberally throughout the series... such as Richard Kiel, Victor Jory, Phil Silvers (in an episode written by Hammer’s Jimmy Sangster), Julie Adams, Erik Estrada and one time Wonder Woman Cathy Lee Crosby. Not too mention a fair few shout outs to various horror institutions such as, in an episode where one of the characters is watching The Mummy’s Ghost (reviewed here), there’s also a character called William Pratt (which was the real name of Boris Karloff, of course). Actually, that specific episode has the greatest scene of any Kolchak story in it, where Ron Updyke tells Kolchak and Vincenzo about an accident with a truck carrying some animals to a zoo. “It seems some dangerous animals did escape, including two large apes, a pair of adult African gibbons, as well as a Malayan tiger, a civet cat, and a pie-cost.”, he says. “What's a pie-cost?” asks Vincenzo, concerned. “89 cents.” says Ron. I’m not quite sure why certain people of my acquaintance can’t see that it’s one of the greatest jokes ever put on screen but, well... it just is totes hilar, as far as I’m concerned.

I loved the show and I even loved the somewhat pathetic man-crocodile creature in the last episode, The Sentry, which completely nicked its whole plot idea (and a very similar setting) to one of my all time favourite Star Trek episodes The Devil In The Dark... how the company never got sued for this one when it’s so patently obvious it’s ripped off from that one is anybody’s guess.

Something I didn’t know, which explains a lot, is that Darren McGavin didn’t really want to turn Kolchak into a weekly series, although you wouldn’t know it from the quality of his and Simon Oakland’s performances in the show, which is reason enough to watch in itself. He was happy doing just a third movie but the show went ahead in the end and he and Oakland came with it... talked into it by the producing role which he was then never credited for. This meant a lot of friction with the other producers and, this eventually is what brought about the demise of the show, it turns out. Not bad ratings but, McGavin finally telling Universal that he’d had enough and wanted out. And so it came to pass and, it’s a shame but, maybe not so much of a shame in that the plots might have gotten a bit over familiar if it had gone on for too long.

Kolchak The Night Stalker is still a great show though and it’s honestly never looked better than the relatively new Blu Ray set put out by Kino Lorber. Like the two TV movies they also put out, it looks so clear and sharp it could have been shot yesterday. And I think it’s a testament to the high respect in which the show is held that, amongst the few extras on the four discs of five episodes apiece, each and every episode has some ‘guest star’ providing a commentary track for that installment... which is nice. So, yeah, again this is a highly recommended show with some nice scoring, mostly by Gil Mellé and Jerry Fielding which, alas, has not seen the light of day as yet as a commercially available recording. But, although McGavin was done with the series, this wasn’t quite the end of Kolchak. I’m not going to watch the painfully received, short lived, ‘missed the point’ modern remake of the show from 2005 (which lasted only half as long as this one did before cancellation) but the character did live on in other media... which I’ll get too in my next two reviews.