Review: "Kolchak: The Night Stalker"

Jeff Rice (Creator), began airing 13/09/1974, “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, Francy Productions, Universal Studios

Television programming has come a long way since the ‘60s and this is a good thing. Going back to the early days of TV is salutary and highly educational and it allows you to get sense of how far things have come. In some ways it’s a bit tedious because old TV shows often don’t date that well and can come across as a little hokey; at other times it’s a completely refreshing experience. “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” is a case in point.

This is a ground-breaking television show, although if Chris Carter of “X-Files” fame hadn’t mentioned it, few people nowadays would have even heard of it. Unlike many other ‘supernatural’ 60s TV programs, it sits uneasily in the genre: it’s no “Bewitched”, or “I Dream of Jeanie”; it’s closer to the “Addams Family” in a sense, but not quite. In a way it’s sort of like “The Mary Tyler-Moore Show” meets “The Munsters”.

The set-up is this: Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) is a crime reporter working for the Independent News service (INS) in Chicago; his boss Antonio “Tony” Vincenzo (Simon Oakland) rides him constantly, demanding hard-nosed, on-time and above all, ‘normal’ news stories, despite which Carl always seems to find the bogey-man behind the scenes. The scene is pure sit-com: Kolchak has a long-term disdain of Ron “Uptight” Updyke (Jack Grinnage) the finance reporter and coddles Miss Emily Cowles (Ruthy McDevitt) the ‘Agony Aunt’ columnist and crossword writer. Along the way, we meet Monique Marmelsteen the cadet reporter, who works in the office as a grudging favour to Tony’s cousin in New York, and then there’s “Gordy the Ghoul” who works at the morgue and runs a lottery based on the birth dates of the cadavers which he oversees. In the newspaper office scenes you expect Mary Tyler-Moore, or even Candice Bergen, to wander in at any moment.

The break with tradition is that Kolchak encounters and then eliminates supernatural horrors that crawl out of the woodwork. Vampires, werewolves, demons, ghosts – he spots them and, generally without the support of anyone else, brings them to book. There’s a freshness to these stories that’s truly entertaining – the werewolf story takes place on a cruise ship for example; that’s about as far away from the Scottish Highlands as you can get!

Guest stars wander in and out. If you know your 60s television, this becomes an exercise in ‘spot that face’. Alice Ghostley plays a dithering professor of cultural anthropology in “Bad Medicine”; Larry Storch appears in “Vampire” as an up-and-coming fellow reporter en-route from the Las Vegas beat to the high-flying career summits of TV journalism in New York. Tom Skerrit of Alien fame is the senator-elect who has sold his soul to Satan. It pays to have IMdB open nearby as you’re watching!

So, you get to see a traditionally-formatted sit-com television show that has branched out into its own new territory: very satisfying. Sadly, the technology of the day is still quite embryonic and most of the horrors discussed are poorly-lit, generated out of stock footage and covered in cheesey make-up and bad wigs. Richard Kiel (“Jaws” of Bond fame) headlines as an Indian Manitou in one episode, but hangs around for the next to portray a suitably-tall Cajun swamp monster (draped in Spanish moss), his name buried in the cast list. So the producers were really making sure they got their money’s worth!

The episode that seems to have directly inspired Chris Carter, was the one about UFOs entitled “They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be” – how’s that for a mouthful of a title? Most of the action is a bunch of stuntmen in police uniforms flying through the air; occasionally, the camera zooms in and loses focus on the screaming face of an alien’s victim. The rest is weird sound effects and some wonky dissolves. Nevertheless, it’s the story that works here and it’s pure gold: the aliens are sucking the bone marrow out of people and animals whilst obtaining electronic components to repair their stranded spacecraft; Kolchak follows the clues and discovers that his camera flash repels the advancing alien horrors, only to work out later that it’s not the light of the flash but the high-pitched whine of the battery recharge. His pursuit of the entities, the working out of their weakness, the shadowy G-men interfering with the police investigation, it’s all familiar territory for “X-Files” fans but here it’s forging new territory.

My own experience of this show when I was a kid in the 70s was seeing the episode about a haunted suit of armour that wanders around its museum exhibit killing those connected to its ancient curse. When I got hold of my set of DVDs for this show, it’s the first one I turned to. Magic!

One excellent thing about this show is that the usual stand-bys of today’s TV programs never appear. We don’t have a “Groundhog Day” episode, where time repeats itself over and over again; there’s no 'Mind Swap' episode, where the main characters are forced to endure time in someone else’s body. There’s no 'Las Vegas Field Trip' episode; or 'Let’s Go To England!' feature. No 'Doppelganger Commits A Crime And I Get The Blame' episode; or 'Wake Up: It’s all A Dream' storylines. Not even the dreaded 'Clip Show' abomination. Look through your DVD collection: the “X-Files”, “Supernatural”, “Stargate”, “Star Trek” – they all take off on these jaunts occasionally. But not Kolchak – this kind of stuff wasn’t invented back then.

Darren McGavin is a perfect fit for the schmoozing, wheedling Kolchak. He moves like a dancer, even though he’s supposed to be bumbling and clumsy: he’s a wonderful physical comedian. The dialogue is rapid-fire and sharp: you’ll find yourself re-winding moments to catch the vitriol barbs in flight. The humour is light and breezy, despite the grisly subject matter and it works wonderfully. The way that Kolchak fast talks and oils his way into situations to get his stories is a pure textbook demonstration of how a skill set such as this would work in a Call of Cthulhu game. On top of everything else, it’s Kolchak’s (McGavin’s) voice that seals the deal: the voiceovers and monologues that move the action forward are sonorous and wry, perfectly catching the hard-bitten, cynicism and puckish glee of his character.

Fans of that other wannabe-wizard named ‘Harry’, Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden, will find a lot of resonance with this show, and not simply because of the Chicago setting: it’s clear that Chris Carter wasn’t the only one who was influenced by this program.

Why did it only last one season then? Well, as I suspect many television show producers and creators have discovered, coming up with a new nemesis every week begins to stretch credibility somewhat: how many monsters could there be roaming around Chicago? By the last few episodes of Kolchak, the production becomes somewhat lacklustre: the giant lizard creature beneath the records depository in the final instalment is simply a guy in a rubber suit; and not a particularly convincing one. This episode feels like everyone involved thought “they’ll never buy this”; and they’re right – we don’t. The budget just couldn’t stretch to cover the concept.

It’s clear that Carter thought the addition of an over-arching storyline, moved along every episode, would cure the 'next week; new monster' problem, and to an extent, it does, and did for the nine seasons of “The X-Files”. However, the new re-make of “The Night Stalker” tried to do that too and it fell dramatically flat on its backside. By making Kolchak (now played by Stuart Townsend) a broodingly-dogged reporter with a mysterious past and a connexion to something mystically unsettling, it was too much of a break. Kolchak’s not an anti-hero per se, although he sometimes pushes the line: he braves the shadows; he doesn’t dwell amongst them. One thing I did particularly like though, was the way they matted Darren McGavin into some of the opening scenes of the new show: respect!

And if you’re a fan, and you want more of McGavin, he guest-stars in the X-Files episode “Agua Mala”, wherein a water creature runs riot during a Floridian hurricane: it’s a great performance, pure Kolchak!

Four tentacled horrors from me!