The Night Strangler

Bloodless In Seattle

The Night Strangler
USA 1973
Directed by Dan Curtis
ABC Circle Films/Kino Lorber
USA Blu Ray

Warning: Yeah, some spoilerage occurs here.

So, after the smash hit ratings of the original TV movie The Night Stalker (reviewed by me here), Dan Curtis, who had produced the original movie, jumped into the directing chair to give us his sequel, The Night Strangler. This one again has a screenplay by Richard Matheson but it’s not based on another unpublished Jeff Rice novel as before. In fact, the publication of that first novel was held up while Rice was commissioned to write a follow up novel based on Matheson’s script for this one, so both novels could be released simultaneously and take the number one best sellers spot in 1974.

This movie once again has Darren McGavin playing Carl Kolchak, the role he was born to play, this time relocated to Seattle and still trying to peddle the true story of the vampire killings as depicted in The Night Stalker. And once again, the story is told via his narrative voice overs on the soundtrack. In a truly wonderful scene, after we see the first murder of the film, Kolchak is reunited with his former editor, the long suffering Tony Vincenzo (once again played by Simon Oakland), who is now working for the Daily Chronicle in Seattle under a chief of staff played by veteran actor John Carradine. Against his better judgement, Vincenzo gets Kolchak a job on the paper and assigns him to investigate the murders. In this case, a quantity of blood is removed from each dead girl (as the bodies mount up) and it’s not long before, with the help of the newspaper’s archive librarian and research guru, played by Wally Cox (who died suddenly one month after this was first shown on television), Kolchak finds himself attempting to track down a killer of the supernatural bent.

This time around, the ghoulish looking killer has been around for over a hundred years, a doctor in the union army who stumbled upon an elixir which grants him reprieve from ageing but, every twenty one years, when he starts to look more like a walking corpse (with superhuman powers, naturally), he needs to kill six girls in a period of 18 days and extract blood from them within seconds of their death, as the final ingredient of his elixir. Once he takes the potion those six times, he doesn’t have to worry about losing the effects for another twenty one years.

And it’s all great stuff. As usual, the main source of pleasure from the tale is the absolutely brilliant chemistry between McGavin and Oakland, as they shout at each other across the editor's desk while Kolchak tries to get Vincenzo to publish the facts about the case while under direct threat from the police force. Once again, a more than one hundred years old killer at loose in Seattle is not good for tourist season. Joining Carradine and Cox are a load of fine character actors... these things are really well cast. Among others are Jo Ann Pflug (Lt Dish from M*A*S*H) playing Kolchak’s love interest (of sorts), Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West herself), Al Lewis (that’s Grandpa Munster to you) and, as the aged killer, Michael Anderson (who, of course went on to regularly play Oscar Goldman in the original series of The Six Million Dollar Man, after McGavin had played a similar role in the TV movie/pilot episode of that show).

This is one of only two productions I know of (although I’m sure there must have been more) which showcases the secret underground city beneath Seattle, which was built over and which is now used for tour guides. The other film I know which featured this was the recent, quite wonderful horror movie Malignant (which I reviewed here). Ironically, in the case of The Night Strangler, reproduction studio sets plus the Bradbury Building of Los Angeles were used rather than shoot on location in the real underground city. But still it’s a nice location to include in a story and I’d love to go there one day (although I probably will never get there, it would also be true to say).

The Night Strangler is, it has to be said, not quite as sinister as The Night Stalker but it’s still an absolutely brilliant sequel to the original and it’s hard for me to decide which one I like best. The two films work very well together as a double bill, it has to be said and I’ll continue to revisit them often. And once again, we have the brilliant Bob Cobert providing that jazzy, sometimes chaotic but always toe tapping score which follows Kolchak around, whenever he’s on the prowl for his newspaper story. Unfortunately, Cobert didn’t follow in the next set of Kolchak adventures, instead he was replaced with Gil Mellé.

As I think I mentioned in my review of the first movie, there was a third movie originally planned, The Night Killers but, instead, a TV show was commissioned and plot elements of that third one were recycled into at least one episode of that show. If The Night Strangler has one thing it can be criticised for, it’s the fact that it’s more or less a rerun of the first Kolchak movie (something that could be levelled at a lot of modern day movie sequels too, to be fair). It’s a criticism which stuck with Kolchak when the TV show was aired, with people referring to it as a ‘monster of the week’ show and, perhaps, this element is what led to the show's cancellation, 20 episodes in. More on the TV show tomorrow but, yeah, The Night Strangler is a sheer delight and another great movie where you can watch Darren McGavin and Simon Oakland get in each other’s faces and yell the hell out of each other. Another fun watch.