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 About that, the credit on screen is that it’s “adapted from an unpublished story by Jeff Rice”.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(aka The Kolchak Tapes) and it’s true, he couldn’t get it published until someone at the production company read the unpublished manuscript and turned it into this TV movie (and it was lamented by Curtis, after the fact, that he didn’t release the movie in cinemas instead, he thought it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.

The Alpha Incident

Take The A Strain

The Alpha Incident
USA 1978 Directed by Bill Rebane
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: An incident or two of spoilers.

Well, I finally saw a Bill Rebane movie that I really liked. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still quite cheaply made but, since not a great deal of large budget stuff happens, it doesn’t matter if we don’t see any of it on screen because this kind of script is perfect for low budget.

The film starts off with a credits sequence over footage of blood cells, cueing you in straight away that this is going to be one of those viral movies like The Andromeda Strain (reviewed here) or The Satan Bug (reviewed here). Indeed, like The Andromeda Strain, this particular type of virus comes from space, specifically brought back from Mars via a Martian probe. A team of scientists are studying it in a lab and trying to figure out what causes it to kill their various rats and mice, in some instances forcing their brains out through their heads. About a fifth of the action takes place here, crosscutting from the main focus of the story and back to these labs every so often but, once again it is man’s folly which brings about the ‘incident’ of the title (although what the heck ‘Alpha’ is supposed to be isn’t really made clear... I couldn’t find mention of it in the movie).

The film even has a real old-school Hollywood star in it, in the form of Ralph Meeker, who you may remember in such parts as Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer in the outstanding Kiss Me Deadly, or as Kolchak’s buddy in the original TV movie of The Night Stalker. He was just recovering from some kind of heart attack when he made this so he doesn’t do much more than sit around, get up and talk a little while using a load of facial expressions for the most part... but that’s fine. That’s pretty much everyone’s role and, that’s part of the beauty of the film.

Anyway, the majority of the martian virus is being transferred by train to another lab for military experimentation, so it’s shunted into a siding by a small town railway station one morning. However, what the government guard on the train didn’t realise is that one of the curious train guards, played by George ‘Buck’ Flower, allowed his curiosity to get the better of him and he snuck a look at the mysterious cargo, accidentally breaking it and absorbing the virus through the broken glass lodged in his hand. Still not knowing what it is, he greets and has contact with the three workers in the station’s office the next morning and then, when the government guard, who may or may not be infected, finds out, he quarantines the place and the government evacuates the town and puts the national guard out. The government guy wounds one of the three, to stop him from leaving and also wounds Flower, who manages to make it into the surrounding forest to die.

And from here on in, the film becomes an intense, claustrophobic study of four people... the old timer (Meeker), the obnoxious one, the sexy lady and the government’s man... as they are forced to be in lockdown together. Later on, as new things are understood about the virus from the scientists working around the clock to find an antidote, it transpires that the thing activates and kills you when you fall asleep (which may or may not be a nice nod to Invasion Of The Body Snatchers). So the army send a helicopter to drop off coffee and amphetamines and, yeah, things get intense with the four people, who happen to find themselves in a Bill Rebane film... and, as I mentioned in my reviews of Rebane’s Monster-A-Go-Go (reviewed here) and Invasion From Inner Earth (reviewed here), Rebane seems to be all about mutual dislike and confrontation.

The film even has some really nice cinematography throughout too (probably from the director or one of his family) and includes some nice frame compositions. Such as a wonderful moment when two scientists are talking halfway up a stairwell. We see them from the side, framed in a kind of artificial diamond shape made from the tops and bottoms of the flights of stairs above and below them. It looks pretty good.

Or another moment when two of the men at the station are having an argument just outside the office. As they verbally spar in the foreground, we can see Ralph Meeker through the glass door quietly observing them from inside, his head perfectly framed in the top panel of the door.

There’s also a wonderful scene in a laboratory in the third part of the film where the colours are all slats of oranges and reds, which really lift the humdrum nature of the scientist sequences at this point.

Somehow, through all of this, the director manages to squeeze in a shot of Jenny, the female member of the station office workers, played by Carol Irene Newell, as she undresses and, believe it or not given the scenario, shoots a sex scene with her in it too. I guess it’s as good as any way to stay awake although, she seems a bit reluctant, to tell the truth.

And if you’ve read this far... here’s where the spoilers reside so, if you’re looking to see this anytime soon, skip the last couple of paragraphs. Fair warning.

Unlike some of Bill Rebane’s earlier movies, which often had a small but positive silver lining behind the ending... this movie is unflinchingly pessimistic and bleak in its outlook. Meeker is the first to go and suddenly throws a fit after he doses off, followed by a nice practical effects shot of his rubberised head with its eyeballs popping out and his brain making its way out the back of his skull (this is the most graphic I’ve seen Bill Rebane get, thus far). This is followed by the sad and lonely Jenny blowing her brains out in her car and then, when the government man and one deliberately obnoxious character are the only two left, the audience gets the news that the government is giving up on them as no cure has been found. So they helicopter drop off an ‘antidote’ for the people, not realising they’d not all take it at once. The obnoxious fellow does and they find out, to their dismay via his death, that the antidote was a cyanide capsule. Then the government man falls asleep but then, the next morning, he wakes up unscathed and he realises he was never infected by the virus himself... which is a bit of a waste because, well, lets just say that fans of George R, Romero’s classic Night Of The Living Dead will recognise that this has pretty much the same ending and leave it at that. So, yeah, pretty bleak.

All in all though, I have to say I really enjoyed this one. The film even has an original score this time around by Richard A. Girvin. He puts one foot wrong early on with some overly comic music for when Flowers goes to investigate the cargo in the train but, mostly it’s very cool, understated work which goes well with the chilling tone of the movie.

As I write these words (probably at least six months* before this review gets up on the site... I have a bit of a backlog of reviews to publish) I’m still in the newly extended coronavirus half-lockdown shilly shally which the government have lengthened rather than put us in proper lookdown and closing the borders. So The Alpha Incident was kind of a comforting watch in terms of having a situation I could directly relate to. Ralph Meeker’s character sums it up nicely when he’s talking to the government man... “I sure never expected anything like this’d happen in my life.” Yep, I think that goes for all of us in the world at the moment, to be honest. The Alpha Incident is a really cool movie and I’m happy to have been acquainted with it, thanks to Arrow’s Weird Wisconsin - The Bill Rebane Collection. I hope some of the others I haven’t watched yet are as good as this one.

*More like 18 months, it turns out

The Detective

Die Hard Zero Issue

The Detective
USA 1968
Directed by Gordon Douglas
20th Century Fox Region 2

Warning: Routine spoilers will be pursued and outed.

There are two reasons why I wanted to watch the Frank Sinatra movie The Detective. One is because the score is by Jerry Goldsmith... and it’s always worth seeing how his musical cues which you’ve lived with for a while match up to the images in context.

The other reason is that I could remember loving the Tony Rome films when I was a kid and when it came to eventually catching up to the movies on DVD I found that it was actually cheaper, at around the £8 mark, to buy the two films in a box set with The Detective than it was to buy the two films individually. If there’s a concept I like best with my movie purchases then it’s “value for money”.

Now then... there’s something very spooky about my choice of viewing when I sat down to watch this film because I found out something about it just before I wrote this review that I didn’t know before, to my knowledge, and therefore didn’t trigger my choice subconsciously. I was going to watch the first four Die Hard movies, more or less back to back, for one of those longish “film series in one gulp” reviews I occasionally do. For some reason, though, I reached for the Sinatra box instead and watched this. Which is very interesting because...

The Detective stars Frank Sinatra as policeman Joe Leland, the character in the book of the same name on which this film was based, written by  Roderick Thorp. So far, so good. However, the writer also wrote a sequel about this character called Nothing Lasts Forever and, Frank Sinatra was contracted to have first refusal on the part although, when they finally got around to making it, Sinatra was 76 years old and turned it down. The book apparently tells the story of what happens when Leland’s daughter gets trapped in the Claxxon Oil Corporation skyscraper because it is taken over by German terrorists and... yeah, you guessed it. They offered the part in the sequel to Bruce Willis, changed Joe Leland to John McClane, changed his daughter to his wife, changed the corporation name to Nakatomi and renamed the story Die Hard... and pretty much launched the career of Willis in film after he’d had such a successful time on television.

So there’s that... but I didn’t know any of that when I came to watch it.

The Detective is a very unusual movie in that, and this is especially true of the time in which it was made, the narrative is a little disjointed and spans a few years before wrapping up things which look like they don’t match up and adding a certain amount of downbeat closure to things.

Even the opening is unusual in that it starts with the standard shots of a US city skyline, but it’s all upside down. Now I saw the same thing done in the excellent horror movie, Devil, a few years back, but Devil didn’t seem to have any rationale to shooting this in this manner. The Detective is really neat because, about halfway through the upside down title shots, the camera suddenly pans up and you get the lower half of the screen still upside down with the city the right way up in the top half of the screen. This is because the camera has panned up to show you that what you’ve actually been looking at is the buildings reflected in the roof of Frank Sinatra’s car as he drives to the scene of the murder which kick starts the movie. This is pretty good and I was pleased that I’d seen this movie already, just from the titles.

It then goes straight into police procedure and it’s Sinatra and his team at the 19th Precinct working a horrendous murder case where a guy has been bashed in the head and his penis cut off and flung across the room. The sequence lasts for a good quarter of an hour or so and it seems everyone and their dog are in this movie... Sinatra, Ralph Meeker, Robert Duvall, Tom Atkins (his debut), Jack Clugman... heck, even boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson is in here. Alongside loads of “oh, it’s him/her” actors and actresses who will, no doubt, catch your attention.

However, after this scene, Joe goes to see his wife (from whom he has split up) and, as he leaves her to her friends at a party, the film then goes into an extended flashback set of sequences, lasting at least as long as the opening scenes, telling the story of Joe and his wife Karen, portrayed by the wonderful Lee Remick, and how they got together.

Then, after a while, the film goes back to the case which involves Joe's pursuit of a murderer in the gay community and this too is cut up with further flashbacks of Joe and Karen as they get married and have problems which can probably only be summed up as Karen suffering from a kind of extended nymphomania. Then Joe finds ‘the killer’, played brilliantly by Tony Musante, who some of my readers may know best from films like the spaghetti western Il Mercenario, Argento’s The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and The Last Run. I‘ve never had a great deal of time for the actor, to be honest, but he really gives a deranged and sympathetic, if short, performance here. Short because Joe presses him for a fast confession (because he’s eyeing a promotion) and he gets dealt with in the electric chair. Case closed... and we’re only halfway through the movie so far.

Then comes more flashbacks and non-flashbacks with Karen and then a second case, years later, which will end up bringing some interesting things to light, including some downbeat conclusions about the first case and a possible romantic attachment to another character played by Jacqueline Bisset.

The film is directed by Gordon Douglas who did such great work on films like THEM! and In Like Flint but who was never much one for making any elaborately attractive shots (except maybe with his work on Rio Conchos, reviewed here), or at least that’s how I’ve always thought of him. As I would expect, the mise-en-scene is adequate and the editing more than competent... nothing too special but very work-a-day and, in that sense at least, quite accomplished. You’re in the good hands of somebody who knows how to put a picture together.

There’s not a lot of action in this film... two small sequences, one involving a chase and another involving a brief but intense shoot out in an indoor car park, when Joe is targeted by people who don’t want him involved in the second case... but it’s not meant to be an action film, I suspect. It’s more of a character study of Joe and Karen’s relationship which uses the backdrop of Joes detective work and the politics of it, to further explore the way his mind works and the way that affects his home life.

Goldsmiths score is, at times, a bit bluesy and, in the action and suspense scenes, dynamic and propulsive in much the same kind of vein he used for his score to Escape From The Planet Of The Apes, only three years later, and maybe also foreshadowing his score to Chinatown too, in places. There’s not much of it in the movie. I’d guess less than 20 minutes of music scattered throughout the whole thing, but US filmmaking was a lot different in those days, and directors trusted that a lot of their movies didn’t have to be wall-to-wall score and only needed the enhancement of some good musical accompaniment at certain points. Goldsmith was a master of this talent of working out when to have music in the final cut of a film (called ‘spotting’ in the industry) and more than once argued for there to be a lot less music in a movie than was originally intended by the director. The music works pretty well here, although at certain places it gets a bit like it’s Mickey Mousing things a bit too much (Mickey Mousing is the practice of using sequences of musical notes and ‘stingers’ to directly reflect the actions taking place on screen) but at the end of the day underlines certain tensions and emotions in just the right way... not always an easy tightrope to walk.

So there you have it. Frank Sinatra in The Detective. All the performances by the cast are top notch, it’s gritty to the point of brutal in some places (for the time) and it’s a fine film. Now I need to go and watch the sequel, Die Hard, again sometime soon.