Today’s movie, The Night Stalker, is about a veteran reporter who has come to believe a vampire is behind a series of gruesome murders plaguing Los Vegas. His dogged investigation encounters resistance from his editor as well as from the authorities who don’t believe such a thing is possible.
Reviews:
Themidnightcafe writes:
It is very much an early 1970s TV movie. The budget was clearly very limited – there is hardly any set design, or lighting design, or any design of any kind. The violence is mostly off-screen. There are a few tussles and quite a few cops shooting blanks at the killer (they don’t even bother with squibs), but nothing particularly visually interesting. The plot plays pretty fast and loose with anything close to how things would actually go. Even though the police and politicians hate Kolchak they keep inviting them to their private meetings to discuss the case and then ask everyone to keep quiet about it. As if a reporter, especially one as nutty as Kolchack, will keep quiet about a serial killer.
I did enjoy that it was shot in Las Vegas and there are a lot of exterior scenes. I love getting glimpses of a city from years gone by. Every time they drove by the Stardust Casino I wondered if Lefty Rosenthal (portrayed by Robert DeNiro in Casino) was there.
Despite all of this, I really rather enjoyed it. McGavin is a lot of fun to watch and it all plays out with this goofy kind of joy to it.
A reviewer at letterboxd writes:
This is unquestionably everything I want from a film, a pulpy 70s detective-type story set in the seedy underbelly of a big city, playing the mystery angle completely straight all the while speculating on a underlying supernatural cause. It’s fantastic, exactly what a good story should be, I immediately want 20 or so of these and luckily they exist. Even beyond the basic premise and writing it’s hard not to admire how good this film looks, the midnight POV driving shots through Vegas, the aggressive jazz during the poolside fight, the silent creeping through the old house, there’s something unsettling about this whole thing and it’s magnetic, I’m instantly obsessed. I actually want to use this story as a foundation for something I’m writing, I want to study this as a grounded mystery in a world firmly off the ground. This is the Rosetta stone to understanding some of the best media of the last fifty years, I can’t stress enough how much I love this film.
Roy Webber, author of The Dinosaur Films of Ray Harryhausen and occasional content contributor to Svengoolie, writes:
A very familiar made-for-TV vampire movie, by Dan Curtis of DARK SHADOWS fame. Great action and a few genuine chills, though it cannot totally escape a low-budget tinge which shows up here and there. This movie and its follow-up, THE NIGHT STRANGLER, helped launch a one season NIGHT STALKER series from 1974-1975 with Darrin McGavin again as the investigative reporter; it still airs on the MeTV network Saturday nights at midnight. Barry Atwater, the vampire, played the Vulcan Surak in the Season 3 STAR TREK TOS episode “The Savage Curtain”.
This is a strange film, enjoyable but strange. It’s a kind of chimera, on one hand you have the hoary tale of a pugnacious reporter hot on the trail of a big story and on the other hand you have, well, a vampire. It works, make no mistake, but the transition from vampiric theory to vampiric certainty on the part of Kolchak (Darin McGavin) is rather sudden and is brought to an enjoyable apex when he argues with the authorities in no uncertain terms that they must be dealing with a vampire. It’s as if he had encountered one before, as if THEY are the crazy ones for not considering this possibility in the first place. That oddness adds an interesting flavor to the film and it must have appealed to the audiences of the day as it was wildly popular and spawned a sequel, which will be presented here at a later date, as well as a television show.
Director: John Llewellyn Moxey
Notable actors: Darin McGavin, Claude Akins, Barry Atwater
Spoilers!
Synopsis: A veteran reporter Kolchak, trying to rebuild his career after being fired from numerous former positions, latches on to the case of a woman viciously murdered on the Strip in Los Vegas. The authorities are clueless as to why her throat is torn as if by an animal and there is no blood on the scene or in her body. The reporter has a theory that they are dealing with a killer who thinks he is a vampire.
The murders continue, violently and without the presence of blood. The reporter pushes his theory on his editor and the authorities who dismiss him as a crank. His job is threatened and the authorities warn him they are running out of patience with him and his crackpot notions of vampirism.
After a blood bank is robbed, the authorities encounter a suspect who tosses the apprehending officers aside like rag dolls. Several shots are fired but the robber brushes them off and makes his escape. Based on the man’s prodigious strength and immunity to gunfire, along with the urging of his girlfriend, Kolchak comes to believe that they are in fact dealing with a real vampire.
When the authorities again fail to capture the killer, now identified as one Janos Skorzeny, they are forced to consider Kolchak’s unorthodox ideas. Meanwhile, Kolchak is tipped off as to the whereabouts of Skorzeny and sneaks into the creepy house at the address he is given. Poking around for evidence, he discovers bottles of blood in a fridge as well as a woman tied to a bed with her blood being drained. The sudden return of the killer leads to a fight. A friend of Kolchak’s arrives and the two manage to engage Skorzeny until dawn arrives. Weakened, the now confirmed vampire is staked through the heart by Kolchak.
Proud of his victory and excited at the prospect of a big story, Kolchak proposes to his girlfriend. But his editor and the authorities have other ideas. Rather than run his story, they plant a less supernatural tale in the paper and threaten Kolchak with being charged with murder if he doesn’t get out of town. Now alone, as his girlfriend has already been chased away by the authorities, he relocates to New York. The movie ends with him laying on his bed and finishing his taped records of the case, noting that there are no witnesses left to verify his account.
