Kolchak: The Night Stalker: "The Ripper," "The Zombie," “They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be …..” (Universal, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My original plan for last night was to watch the Lifetime movie Vanished: Searching for My Sister at 8 p.m. but I nodded off in my chair and didn’t get up until 815 p.m. I looked for someone else in the DVD backlog and fount it in the first three episodes of the 1974-75 TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. This was originally a TV-movie from 1972 called The Night Stalker for which someone at Universal had the bright idea of combining a modern-style newspaper drama, starring Darren McGavin as a hard-boiled reporter and Simon Oakland (mostly a TV actor, though his most famous feature film credit was as the therapist who comes on at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to explain Norman Bates’ psychopathology to us and he also was in such important films as the 1961 West Side Story and 1969\s Bullitt and he played the cop running David Cassidy’s character in the late 1970’s cop series David Cassidy-Man Undercover) as his equally irascible editor. The gimmick was that this show featured real-life monsters, partly if not totally from Universal’s horror stable, as the bad guys, and of course Kolchak cannot get his editor and the police (with whom he has an antagonism between a love-hate relationship and a hate-hate relationship) to believe him.

The three episodes we watched last night were “The Ripper,” “The Zombie” and the awkwardly titled “They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be …..” In the “Ripper” episode, Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) decides that the serial killer currently terrorizing women in his home town of Chicago is the original Jack the Ripper, somehow miraculously preserved after nearly 100 years, He has periodically surfaced in a major city somewhere n the world and does his thing, murdering five women (the total the real Jack the Ripper racked uo) who, if not out-and-out sex workers, were people who work at the fringes as strippers or illegitimate “masseuses.” Kolckak’s investigation centers around the Sultan’s Palace “massage” parlor (I’m putting the word “massage” in quotes out of respect for the people I know who are legitimate masseurs and masseuses), where one woman is strangled to death and there’s a lot of atavistic comic throwback concerning Updyke (Jack Grimmage), who for some reason editor Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland) gets assigning to these grisly murders even though he’s appalled at the sight of blood and keeps dashing out to the nearest men’s room. (In a 1930’s version of this story Edward Everett Horton would have played him.) Kolchak finally realizes that bullets just go right through him but the one thing he’s vulnerable to is electricity – he realizes this when he finds that the first execution by electrocution occurred in 1908 (not true: I just Googled it and it was in 1890) – and ultimately he literally melts the Ripper in a lake of mud into which he’s plugged in an electrified fence.

The next episode in sequence was “The Zombie,” in which both white and Black numbers runners run afoul of a voodoo priestess, Marie Juliette Edmonds (Paulene Myers) – referred to as “Mamaloie” (and Charles gave credit to the makers of this show for having the character correct the Anglo cops by insisting her honorific be pronounced “Mamalwah” instead of “Mamaloi”). She’s out to avenge the murder of her dead son by keeping him alive as a zombie (this show was made six years after the film Night of the Living Dead but back when the term “zombie” still meant a person who is dead but his iife was artificially prolonged by voodoo spells and/or drugs, not a mindless radiation victim who survived by eating people’s brains), and in one of the show’s cleverest touches the authorities bury him no fewer than three times and finally give up. Another nice touch was the presence of “Scat Man” Crothers as one of the Black numbers gangsters involved in the racket.

Charles and I were undecided at first as to whether to watch the third show in sequence, “They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be …,” but I’m glad we did because it turned out to be by far the best of the three. This time the monsters were space aliens who’ve landed their spaceship and aren;t either good guys seeing to be taken to our leader or bad guys wanting to conquer us, but simply folks anxious to get their spacecraft up and running so they can go on about their business and not fear or have anything to do with earth at all. If this plot sounds familiar, it should: it’s the basis for the marvelous 1953 Universal vest-pocket sci-fi script It Came from Outer Space (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/11/it-came-from-outer-space-universal.html), written by Ray Bradbury – officially he was credited only with the overall story and Harry Essex wrote the script, but there is enough sensitivity in the actual dialogue it’s hard to believe much of what the actors say didn’t come from Bradbury’s treatment. The Night Stalker treatment, credited to Dennis Lynton Cook for story and Rudolph Borchert for teleplay, retains much of the sensitivity of the original even while still building suspense as to whatever the great whatsits are and why they’re doing what they’re doing, including sucking the bone marrow of every living thing, human or animal, they consume and taking over a planetarium (this is supposed to take place in Chicago but I was able to recognize the familiar steps of the Griffith Park Observatory and inevitably wonder where James Dean and Sal Mineo were).

The scenes of the planetarium machine being taken over by the space aliens and literally hunting down Kolchak as he tries to hide behind the seats are marvelously frightening and a far cry from what we usually get at this level of budget – though I suspect that for the scenes of the spacecraft Kolchak ultimately encounters, parked in an out-of-the-way location along dedicated parkland, Universal borrowed the set and props from the 1966 20th-Century Fox film Fantastic Voyage. In the show’s usual postlude explaining how the events we’ve seen occurring were covered up, Kolchak says the city first attempted to replant the saucer’s footprint but ultimately had to pave the park with concrete after nothing would grow there. There’s also a spectacular sequence in which, cornered in a warehouse full of lead, the space aliens escape by literally melting down the lead. This episode was being a feature for “guest star Dick Van Patten,” but while he’s definitely there and recognizable he’s only in one minor scene and he scarcely qualifies as a “guest star.” I suspect Kolchak: The Night Stalker earned Universal’s DVD release because it was being hailed as a precursor to The X-Files 20 years later, though Charles recalled having seen a TV show from the 1950’s which used the same Jack-the-Ripper-never-died plot trope. I never liked The X-Files – to me it seemed like an ordinary policier with bits of the supernatural thrown in – but Kolchak: The Night Stalker holds up surprisingly well despite the lame bits of so-called “comic relief” that no doubt seemed dated even in 1974.