FireBlade DVD Review: The Night Stalker/The Night Strangler

Review by Jerry Stratton, 3/22/2000

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Carl Kolchak’s original movie, doubled with the pilot for the television series, “The Night Strangler”.

Long before Mulder and Sculley investigated the unknown for the FBI, the fourth estate had things pretty well under control in the person of Carl Kolchak, reporter, Daily News. “The Night Stalker” aired in 1972 and “set ratings records when it first aired” on ABC. Which probably means it had great pre-air advertising, or do ratings only include people who watch all the way through?

With the Night Stalker so popular, a sequel was a given, and the sequel aired in 1973 with a reprise by both Darren McGavin as Carl Kolchak, and Simon Oakland as his long-suffering editor. “The Night Strangler” was the pilot for the television series in 1974, which had a two-year run. I have incredibly fond memories of the “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” series. It was disturbing, fun, and intelligent, a show I looked forward to every week. While I had never seen either of the movies, when I found out they were on DVD I had to have them.

Both movies hold up quite well today, and I hope to see at least the initial episodes of the television series, if not the entire run, brought to DVD as well. It would be wonderful if this could be done while Darren McGavin is still around to give us a commentary on one or two of his favorite episodes.

The basic story is that Carl Kolchak is a down-on-his-luck reporter. Once an award-winning journalist, he’s too driven to maintain good friendships with anyone except the contacts he needs to get information for his stories. But things may be looking up as he discovers a cover-up involving dead young girls and a strange murderer.

“The Night Strangler” follows the same story but this time he’s really down on his luck, and he’s even more desperate for a great story.

The DVD is really nice. Instead of extras (which would have been useful), they provide both movies. The first movie runs 74 minutes, and on the other side, the second movie runs 90 minutes. (Presumably they were an hour and a half, and two hours, on television.)

The picture and sound are both adequate, in fact, quite good from a television master from the early seventies, I suspect. There are problems, especially with the second movie (“The Night Strangler”) which has Kolchak acting especially stupid. Just because he now knows that there are ‘strange things out there’, doesn’t mean that he can expect his newspaper to write about a hundred year-old superhuman corpse. The facts were compelling enough without him putting that spin on it. Also, the second relies heavily on the old notion of the villain explaining his own demise, and then heavily telegraphing the ending.

This movie was probably one of the first to try making dark, moody pieces specifically for television. Television technology had only barely begun to penetrate enough households for this to work. They still needed bright lights shining into an underground tunnel in the middle of the night to let us see what was going on, however. I probably shouldn’t harp on this too much, however: I’m watching it on a 27-inch color television, hardly a big deal nowadays, but the audience for whom it was filmed had much smaller, often black and white televisions. Remember the A-Ha song, “The Sun Always Shines on TV”? It did back then, because a significant number of viewers wouldn’t have been able to see anything if the sun wasn’t shining. This makes it difficult to film a really good moody supernatural piece for television, and the Night Stalker series did a marvelous job of it.

There are a number of familiar faces in here. Larry Linville plays a doctor in the first movie. it’s a bit disconcerting for those of us who picture him as a doctor--for the 4077^th MASH! But he didn’t become the ever-obnoxious Frank Burns until a few months later. Claude Akins has been around forever, of course, but his comedy-sherriff roles in “B.J. and the Bear” and “Sheriff Lobo” didn’t come for a number of years later. Richard Anderson had yet to become the likable Machiavellian of “The Six Million Dollar Man” (taking over a role started by Darren McGavin, the Night Stalker himself). On the other hand, this was one of Margaret Hamilton’s last roles, a long time from the Wicked Witch of the West.

There are certainly plot holes running through both of these movies, but the overall idea, and the presentation, is well done. You might want to rent it first if you haven’t seen it already, but it’s definitely worth a look.

Recommendation: Rent

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Jerry