The Night Stalker

Silk Stalkings

The Night Stalker
USA 1972
Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey
ABC Circle Films/Kino Lorber
US Blu Ray

Warning: Spoilers for the inevitable ending.

Revisiting an absolute legend of a TV character here today. Namely, investigative reporter Carl Kolchak, as portrayed in two TV movies and a TV series, by the late, very great Darren McGavin. I don’t think The Night Stalker is anything like ‘the first’ TV movie ever made, for sure but, something in the back of my mind is telling me that it was the highest rated (or most viewed, if you like) in those early days... not to mention the most brilliantly put together... and helped sell the idea of TV movies as a viable and lucrative art form to the industry (although, I can’t now find any of that backed up by anything on the internet so, hopefully my memory isn’t failing me here).

And no wonder. It has a fine pedigree, being produced by Dan Curtis (who many will remember from many other TV specials and his long running TV show Dark Shadows) and with a screenplay written by the great Richard Matheson. About that, the credit on screen is that it’s “adapted from an unpublished story by Jeff Rice”. It is indeed based on Rice’s novel The Kolchak Papers (aka The Kolchak Tapes) and it’s true, he couldn’t get it published until someone at the production company read the unpublished manuscript and turned it into this TV movie (and it was lamented by Curtis, after the fact, that he didn’t release the movie in cinemas instead, he thought it was that good... which, of course, it is). Rice’s novel (which I’ve read but a long time ago now, might have to reread it soon) was held up until 1974 because, once this TV show aired and a sequel was made (not based on a Rice novel), the publishers wanted Rice to write a second novel based on Matheson’s screenplay for the sequel, so they could release both of Rice’s paperbacks at the top two numbers in the best sellers list... which is what happened in 1974.

It’s a vampire romp and it’s a good one, with Darren McGavin’s acting and constant barrage of cynical voice over absolutely elevating this, as he portrays Kolchak (who if you’re listening carefully and doing the maths throughout the show, has been fired ten times by various newspapers before this story takes place) with a different wardrobe than that suggested by the original screenplay. Because of his character’s fall from grace, he portrays Kolchak in an old vented straw raffia hat and a 1950s style white pinstripe seersucker suit (which you can actually see properly on this new Blu Ray transfer) denoting that he hasn’t been able to afford a suit for quite some time. His beaten up, half rusted car is a further testament to his character’s social status (which is why it grates when the 2005 remake portrayed him as a much more well off, young person... completely at odds with the original character and which I’ve still not been able to bring myself to watch as yet).

The plot is very simple as to be almost a cliché now... set in Las Vegas, various women are turning up with their bodies drained of blood and a local hospital keeps getting its bottles of blood swiped. Kolchak doesn’t want to believe it’s a real vampire but quickly cottons on to the fact it must be... unlike the police, the CIA and various other authorities who manage to let the killer evade them at every opportunity. At the end, Kolchak manages to stake the vampire but is blackmailed to keep the story to himself and ordered to leave LA. He also loses his fiancé Gail, who is exiled from town before he has a chance to find out where she’s gone.

Along with a well filmed story which combines fluid camera shots with a certain amount of hand held footage to give an authenticity to the ‘fly on the wall’ nature of the action sequences, the film has some really great character actors in it... such as Ralph Meeker (who, like McGavin, had also played a version of Mikey Spillane’s hard boiled detective Mike Hammer in the excellent movie Kiss Me Deadly), Simon Oakland who plays Kolchak’s long suffering boss (who would be the only other character to follow McGavin into both the sequel movie and the regular TV show), Claude Akins, Carol Lynley, Larry Linville, Barry Atwater (as the silent but deadly, superhuman vampire) and the one and only Elisha Cook Jr, amongst many others.

To top it off, we have Bob Cobert’s infectious, jazzy theme tune which follows Kolchak around whenever he’s on the beat, reporting on the scene of the crime and, McGavin’s voice over narrative which is another factor that gives the whole film a kind of documentary vibe, as he comes in with dates and times of death or incidents such as... “Thursday May 29th 7.02am”... which is a specific ‘to the minute’ time which lends itself to the reportage of facts rather than just being a story element (Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho used a similar narrative on its typographical updates at the start of the movie).

The film is also nicely designed for the 4:3 aspect ratio, with an especially striking shot playing over the opening credits (following a prologue where Kolchak starts listening to his notes from his tape recorder, to introduce the ‘fact as fiction’ narrative), where three surgeons perform an autopsy of the latest victim, from the POV of the victim herself, their three masked heads forming a triangle looking down into the camera with the big light behind them as they cut into the body where the camera is. As he mentions on one of the extras accompanying this Blu Ray edition, composer Bob Cobert won his battle to keep that scene unscored to really fix the viewers attention, before bringing in the music for the next sequence.

And there’s not much more to say on this one. Kolchak is rightly a well loved and very influential character. After a sequel was filmed, a third movie was ditched in favour of a TV show (both of which I will be reviewing here over the nest few days... along with a couple of other Kolchak items of interest). However, the series only ran for 20 episodes before it was cancelled. However, without Kolchak we wouldn’t have had The X Files, as Chris Carter originally wanted to make a new version of the TV show but wrote The X Files as a response to not being able to secure the rights at the time. He did, however, cast McGavin as the original investigator who started off The X Files in two episodes of the show (after McGavin declined letting the Kolchak character turn up in the series... what a shame, that would have been great) and also cast him as Frank Black’s father in an episode of Millennium (another show that could easily have had Kolchak return and have it all make sense).

If you’ve never seen The Night Stalker, then you really should if you are a fan of the horror genre. It doesn’t downplay the supernatural aspects in the slightest but it does, through the use of the writing and characterisation, couch it in a way that has it collide with a modern, cynical reaction to the myth which powers it. Also, it’s interesting and refreshing that all the authority figures in the film are portrayed as corrupt and basically bad people, interested only in the political stakes that the truth behind the trail of corpses might pose to them personally... in the words of one of them, “It’s bad for business.” They are painted in far worse a light than the central vampire character and are the real evil of the show. So, yeah, check this one out for sure... a true classic of the small screen and, I have to say, Kino Lorber’s recent Blu Ray is absolutely the best I’ve ever seen it looking. I’m really glad I upgraded to this one.

Doc Savage (Gold Key)

Bronzed Gold

Doc Savage
Gold Key USA 1966

Back in 1966, movie history was almost about to be made…

If things had gone to plan, a certain pulp character favourite of mine may well have been a lot better known internationally than he is these days. The film was Doc Savage and it was to star TV western actor Chuck Connors in the title role and to be based on Lester Dent’s Doc Savage novel, The Thousand Headed Man. Alas, an error about certain kinds of rights residing with Dent’s widow and not solely by the company who thought they owned them meant that the producers couldn’t start shooting the film, which was already scripted, on the date they wanted. So, at the eleventh hour, they retained the cast and crew and instead rushed out a western, Ride Beyond Vengeance, instead. Looking over the cast that they ported over into this other production, you can kinda see who some of the actors might have been intended to play in the Doc Savage movie and, I have to say, there are some good facial ‘types’ that showed that the people doing the casting were actually taking their job very seriously.

Chuck Connors, for example, was a good match in looks for the James Bama version of Doc Savage. Bama was the artist who had recently been doing all those wonderful cover paintings for the 1960s Bantam reprints of the novels which were very popular at the time. Although the style of Savage’s look via Bama was very different to that of the paintings which had appeared on the original pulp printings of the novels in the Doc Savage magazine of the 1930s and 40s, they’ve pretty much defined the look of the character ever since and are still imitated in books and comics to this day. Bama’s original model for his covers was Steve Holland, who played Flash Gordon on a dreadful German/American coproduction on TV in the 1950s show of Alex Raymond's much loved character so, if you want to see what the ‘real’ Doc Savage from this period was supposed to look like, take a look at an episode of that. Connors, though, had the same kind of weathered look to him and would have been a good version, physically at least. One can also deduce from the cast that made it into the western that Claude Akins would have been, again at least in terms of facial recognition, a perfect match for Monk Mayfair (one of Doc’s five aides) and, likewise, Michael Rennie would have been a solid choice for Ham Brooks, the lawyer (someone who the film company could have used in real life if they’d wanted a quick legal fix to their problem).

Alas the movie was never made and we shall never know if it would have been a better, more well loved fit to the original material than the George Pal produced Doc Savage movie of 1975 (which I reviewed here) and how much recognition it might have brought the character. What we do have left for us though, is the Gold Key comic from the same year which was almost certainly adapted from the script of that movie (different kinds of rights issues for comics than for movies) and which may or may not have strayed from the script. Certainly it would have been a fairly condensed version of the script to fit into one tiny comic and it really isn’t a thoroughly good job of adapting the novel, for sure. But what is it like as a comic?

Well, I finally bit the bullet on this thing a few years ago on eBay when I found an issue in not bad condition for a, relatively, reasonable price. I’d always wanted to read it and, well, now I have.

The cover is magnificent, being a blown up detail of Bama’s Doc fighting a large snake lifted from the cover of the Bantam reprint of Doc Savage - The Thousand Headed Man… which is, please note, a completely different cover than was used on the UK Corgi edition of the story, where a doctored reprint of a James Bama cover painting from an entirely different Doc Savage novel in the series was used, for reasons completely unknown to me. However, whoever was responsible for the writing of the adaptation and the interior art is completely unknown. It looks to me like Gold Key, even at that time, were not crediting the writers and artists like DC and Marvel were.

What I can tell you about the interior art, however, is that it doesn't really look like the actors from the ‘movie that never was’ and more like the renditions that Bama used to characterise Doc and his crew on the back covers of those Bantam reprints. This makes sense. Many comics are made from film adaptations and usually all the writers and artists have to go on is the working script and a few stills of the characters. Think back to the original Marvel comics adaptation of the first Star Wars film for example… there were loads of scenes in that which didn’t make it into the movie and, decades later in the era of ‘extras’ like deleted scenes, it became apparent that the majority of those sequences were shot but had not made it into the final cut of the film. These things happen but at least the likenesses of the characters, in some cases, looked as they appear in the film (Don’t get me started on Jabba, okay?) so there’s that. Alas, when it came to the Doc Savage movie, the team at Gold Key obviously didn't have any stills to work with so I’m guessing that production went ahead after they knew the film project was cancelled and the rights holders, by now Conde Naste, wanted to recoup some money by letting the comic go ahead. That’s what I suspect, anyway.

And… it’s not a brilliant comic in terms of action, it has to be said. And the writing is not all that dramatic either.. For example, comic  book shorthand to introduce the characters is used and so Ham is much maligned by being referred to as ‘the toff’. Worse still, given that Clark Savage Jr, The Man Of Bronze himself is not exactly noted for an abundance of verbal commentary and, given this is a comic book and even more of a purely visual art form than a film would be, it’s amazing how verbose he is in this. Talking to himself often and using phrases completely out of character for him such as ‘I’ll bet my shirt…’. Sure, that kind of outburst might be fine coming from a few of Doc’s crew but not the man himself, I would say. I think they might have been better using descriptive boxes more on the case of the scenes where Savage is ‘flying solo’, so to speak, rather than put explanations in his mouth when he famously never explains his actions to those around him.

In addition to this, the drama is fairly flat and, though I last read the original novel back in 1975, I remember the mystery of the thing and the unusual keys that drive the story being fairly suspenseful… in other words, fairly standard brilliance that you would expect from Lester Dent writing under the house name of Kenneth Robeson. Here it’s virtually non existent and, while I concur that the whole story in just 32 four colour pages is a pretty tall order, everything here just seems a bit rushed and really doesn’t allow for any of the characters to shine through, least of all Doc, who almost seems like a guest star in his own comic at times.

The art is, fairly nice but there’s nothing too experimental or wildly interesting here. I’d say it’s pretty competent but there purely to illustrate the text, rather then enhance it. The same can be said of the design of the panels too. There’s a pretty rigid layout of mostly five panels per page (asides from the ones I’ve pictured above, obviously). The majority of pages consist of a basic, vertical two by three panel page but with one panel of each page extended either vertically or horizontally to try and break it up just a little. Looking at some other Gold Key comics from the time and others from about eight years later, this is fairly common for the company at the time and they would later on get a little more dynamic with their layouts by the time they were putting out titles like The Occult Files Of Doctor Spektor.

And… that’s about all I have to say about the Gold Key, Doc Savage one-shot based on Doc Savage - The Thousand Headed Man other than to say that, if the film had happened with that script, there’s a good chance it wouldn’t have set cinema screens ablaze but, frankly, we’ll never know how closely it would have followed that script and just how much better it may have been on screen. Still, despite the comic not being all that special, I am really pleased to finally own a copy and, it has to be said, I did learn that Croydon used to have an airport, so there’s that (although, by the time this comic was published, there hadn’t been one there for a while but, still, it’s a 1930s period piece so that’s not really an issue). This one is probably not going to appeal to casual readers, for sure but, for long standing Doc Savage readers like myself, this is pure gold and, dull as this adaptation is, it’s a little piece of both comic book and movie history regarding this character and it’s an essential piece of ephemera, as far as I’m concerned. One for the ages.

Battle For The Planet Of The Apes

Gorillas In Their Midst

Battle For The Planet Of The Apes
USA 1973
Directed by J. Lee Thompson
20TH Century Fox
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoilers but, with this particular movie, you might not really worry about that.

Wow, this is a terrible movie. The swan song of the original Apes movies (although it was followed by two TV different shows - one live action and one cartoon), it’s such a shame that the same director who turned in such a wonderful job on the previous film, Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes (reviewed here), followed it up with such a hollow shell of a movie.  To be fair to Thompson, from what I understand, he was forced to sign on as director before the script of this one was completed... maybe if he’d had seen how the final thing read before he signed then, who knows, he may not have decided to return to the franchise.

This film is the one I mentioned in my review of the first movie in the series here. I saw it at a very young age on a double bill with a movie called The Neptune Factor and, frankly, as a kid it somehow left an impression. At least the one specific scene where all the apes appear dead before Caeser yells “Fight like Apes!” and they all miraculously stand up and kill all the human mutants did... but it wasn’t more than a decade, I think, before I saw it again on television and realised just how bad this one is in comparison with the other films in the series... it even makes Beneath The Planet Of The Apes (reviewed here) look kinda good. I was hoping to see a little more in it this time around, watching the new Blu Ray set but... no... this film is just as dreadful as it always was, I’m afraid.

It starts off a bit hopeful in terms of the “have the studio wised up to their previous continuity errors” factor with a prologue, the first of two bookend scenes, set in the very far future... a bookend scene featuring John Huston as The Lawgiver, a character referred to by Dr. Zaius and others in previous movies. He then starts telling the story of the events of this film and the movie makers wisely don’t put a specific time on the things that take place in the main body of the story. That could have worked, too, if it wasn’t for the fact that Caeser and Lisa, played once again by Roddy McDowell and Natalie Trundy, don’t really seemed to have aged much.

The film, it can be deduced, is set about 12 years after the events of the previous film and, in the interim, we have a post-war Earth where the apes and humans are living, relatively, peacefully together. However, this must make Austin Stoker, playing the brother of Mcdonald in the previous film (the original actor refused to return for this movie and, really, who can blame him?), a very young kid brother to the original character and so, when he and another new character, a smart Orangutan called Virgil, agree to accompany Caeser to the old, bombed out and irradiated city where the ‘other’ McDonald worked in the last film, it makes you wonder how Stoker’s character knows his way around the facilities so well.

As it happens, the journey to find tapes of Caeser’s mother and father is just a plot device to alert the radiation mutated humans living beneath the city to the presence of the apes and humans... so they can mount an army against them. It’s not specifically said but it’s definitely implied (and verified with a ‘lost scene’ involving the origins of the worship of a nuclear bomb) that these people are the ancestors of the future mutant race we learned about in Beneath The Planet Of The Apes. Also, during this scene, the audio tapes of Caeser’s explanation about the rise of the apes, that really dreadful one that made no sense in the otherwise fantastic Escape From The Planet Of The Apes (reviewed here), is severely and conveniently edited to omit the contradictions raised by Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes... although the producers still seem to have forgotten that even this new, truncated version also massively contradicts everything we know of the future ape culture we learn of in the very first movie. So it’s pretty bad news whichever way you look at it.

In this film we have two villains... the human mutant villain who leads an attack on the village of the apes and also the gorilla, Aldo, played by veteran actor Claude Akins. We have a whole subplot where Aldo tries to enslave and, if he had his way, kill all the humans living with the apes and he also kills Caeser and Lisa’s son Cornelius, named after Caeser’s father who was also played by McDowell in the franchise. Everybody has a big fight with the mutants and then there’s a another fight between Caeser and Aldo and then... that’s all folks. We jump to the epilogue bookend where human and ape children in the far, far future are being taught side by side... showing that the events in the last few films have split the timeline off into a different set of future events. Yeah, whatever. I’m less than impressed by this one. You can tell, can’t you?

The thing which disappoints so much with Battle For The Planet Of The Apes is not the fact that the violence was deliberately toned down to nothing so kids could see it... I’ve got absolutely no problem with that if it’s appropriate to the story. It’s not even the fact that the producers were already eyeing the demise of the film series to make way for a dumbed down TV show of the franchise. My real problem is that it already feels like it could be an episode of that show. It’s like a shoot ‘em up, cowboys and indians movie with the apes and humans as two factions of cowboys teaming up against the invading indians as represented by the mutants. There’s nothing truly remarkable or notable in this film that makes it stand out in any way, like every other ape film previous to this one did (even the second one with that quite harsh ending). It all feels so run of the mill and even on a visual level, bearing in mind it has the same director to the previous entry, it lacks a lot and scenes end and transition like they are just stopping and starting around advertising breaks... it’s a bit of a mess. The only time the visual element of the film becomes interesting is in the brief interlude in the bombed out city when Caeser, McDonald and Virgil are being chased by mutants in long, sewer-like tunnels... but it’s just an interlude to throw in a plot element and it doesn’t stay this interesting for very long.

Just to add insult to injury, we have the return of Leonard Rosenman on the score and it’s not in any way resembling what you would normally get, in terms of orchestration, in a Planet Of The Apes movie... it’s just a bit, in modern parlance... meh. Except of course for when Rosenman keeps repeating those blasted tone pyramids at regular intervals... then it just gets really irritating (for more info on my response to Rosenman’s technical bag of tricks, read my review of The Car here). It’s just not, in any way, an interesting or striking movie and, given the mostly high standards and twisty plots of the previous four entries in the series... well it’s just not a fitting end to the original apes series, as far as I’m concerned. And unforgiveably again, for an apes movie, it also has a pretty weak ending. This one’s nothing to write home about and leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, it has to be said. See this one at your peril.

Planet Of The Apes at NUTS4R2

Planet Of The Apes 

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes

Escape From The Planet Of The Apes

Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes

Battle For The Planet Of The Apes

Planet Of The Apes TV Show (live action) - to be reviewed

Time Of The Apes - to be reviewed

Planet Of The Apes (Tim Burton)

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes  

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes

War Of The Planet Of The Apes

Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes

Simians And Serialism - A History and Analysis of 

Jerry Goldsmith’s score to Planet Of The Apes