Kolchak: The Night Stalker - Seventies Weirdness on a Budget

Over the past few days I've watched a number of episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  For a series that only ran for a single truncated season of twenty episodes in the mid-seventies, it has proven remarkably influential.  Indeed, it is pretty much the epitome of a cult TV series, in that it was short-lived, had low ratings on its original network run, remains fairly obscure with regard to the general public, yet has maintained a devoted and loyal fanbase.  Watching episodes now, one is left feeling amazed that it ever went to series, being a spin off of two highly rated TV movies, (The Night Stalker (1972) and The Night Strangler (1973)), whose formats and subject matter would have seemed to be too restrictive for development into a typical prime time network show of the era.  But they gave it a go.  They just didn't give it much of a budget - the episodes are generally scrappy looking, with lots of over-familiar studio sets standing in for exteriors, threadbare production values and some pretty ropey looking monsters.  It is largely carried by the two main cast members, Darren McGavin (as Carl Kolchak) and Simon Oakland (as his harassed boss Tony Vincenzo) and some truly wild scripts which found ingenious ways to try and avoid making the format feel too repetitive.  Although, in truth, every episode was simply a slight variation on the formula of dogged reported uncovers some supernatural threat and has to battle police and authorities to resolve it, but high level cover ups ensure that nobody believes him and his stories never see the light of day.  In the first four episodes broadcast, for instance, he dealt with a reincarnation of Jack the Ripper, a zombie, a vampire and a werewolf (on a cruise ship) in quick succession.  It's to the great credit of the writers that, after running through the traditional monsters, they managed to keep coming up with ever more bizarre creations of their own to keep the series going, including an energy eating monster, a shape-shifting vengeful Native American spirit, a Spanish Moss creature conjured up by the subject of a sleep experiment, a rogue robot and a humanoid reptile.  

At times, despite the restrictions of network TV in the seventies, everything came together - the claustrophobic sets, the limited lighting used to disguise their shoddiness, some truly bonkers scripts, the often larger-than-life performances and some surprisingly good direction - to give episodes, in parts, a truly feverish, even nightmarish, feel.  The only thing that I could never suspend my disbelief over was the fact that Kolchak still had a job, despite his boss's weekly threats to sack him, as, not only were his supernatural stories all spiked, but he never seemed to file any other copy.  Overall, though, you don't come away thinking that this is something that requires a remake of any kind, as it's charm is very much the result of a particular period in time, combined with some crazy writing and fortuitous casting.  Yet, about twenty years ago, somebody tried to do just that.  I say 'somebody', but it was actually ABC, the network that screened the original TV movies and series.  It was hamstrung from the outset by copyright issues: the literary rights to the Kolchak character lie with Jeff rice, upon whose then unpublished novel the first TV movie was based, while Universal retain rights to the TV series - ABC, thanks to its continued ownership of the TV movies,still had dramatic rights to the character.  What this meant in practice was that the new series could only use elements established in those two TV movies, nothing from the TV series.  The resulting series, titled simply The Night Stalker, had only a cursory relationship with the original.  Kolchak was now an investigative reporter with a murdered wife, who looks into other unsolved murders, trying to link them to his wife's and establish some kind of pattern.  Gone was the 'monster-of-the-week' format and with it, the fun.  Not surprisingly, it lasted only six weeks on air, with four episodes left unaired.

On the face of it, the remake series seems to be another example of someone trying to exploit a property without actually understanding where the appeal of the original lay.  They doubtless saw the old series and thought, 'Hey, people like that even though it is really rickety and whacky with no budget - we could remake it 'properly', with a proper budget and actors and then more people will love it!'  Which, of course, isn't the way nostalgia works - devotees of the original series loved it precisely because it was scrappily made on backlot sets, yet delivered in the weird thrills department through ingenious scripts and performances which could carry you past those shortcomings.  But the problem is that to understand that, you have to see Kolchak in its proper context of being a seventies US network product, born of a time when networks were becoming aware that they had to find ways to break out of the indentikit formats for TV shows of that era, but were too timid to really go the whole hog and back something really different.  This resulted in shows like Kolchak, that brought in ideas from outside of the mainstream, but then tried to force them into a familiar, cosy, format, in the belief that audiences wouldn't be able to handle them otherwise.  But people nowadays, it seems, are unable to contextualise stuff, (hence all those warning you get before screenings of old TV shows that they 'reflect the values of their era' - well, of course they do, that surely goes without saying), with the idea that the past might be different from the present seemingly being too mind-blowing for them to grasp.  Anyway, if you like the weird and offbeat seventies style, then Kolchak: The Night Stalker is for you - the episodes vary wildly in terms of quality, but overall, it's an enjoyable experience, often harking back to the good old days of B-movies and pulp magazines in tone and execution.