REVIEW: The Night Strangler (1973)

Only a year after dealing with a vicious vampire in 1972's The Night Stalker, Carl Kolchak has yet another run-in with supernatural evil in the sequel, The Night Strangler. I guess that's a major conceit of all recurring characters in supernatural-related series: they come across incredibly rare unnatural events as though they happened every day. It's a conceit that most audiences are willing to forgive, because overall it's better to have unlikely things happen than to be bored to tears while we wait for something else interesting to occur. I'd hate to think of the realistic version of Kolchak, where he murdered the vampire in part one and then we spent twenty TV seasons watching him languish in jail.

Thankfully, we're treated with a little suspension of reality, and Kolchak -- now trying to peddle his vampire story to papers in Seattle -- runs into his old curmudgeonly boss, Tony Vincenzo. It seems that the vampire debacle also got Vincenzo tossed out of his job as editor, and he's taken up residence in the northwest, again behind the desk of another popular newpaper. Feeling bad for Kolchak's downtrodden state, he gives him a job, and all the old trouble (and fun) begins again.

Another series of murders has begun in Seattle, with each of the lady victims murdered at night, with some blood loss. Kolchak immediately questions whether this might be another vampire on the prowl, but the county coroner confirms that they've only lost about 5ccs of blood, which is a little light for a bloodsucker. Also: small needle marks instead of bite wounds, and the women all actually succumbed to intense strangling and crushed throats. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this was the inspiration for the title.

No, this is no vampire (although he might still be considered a stalker, technically. He stalks, after all. This is the same manner in which I consider myself a writer.) It seems that similar murders occurred twenty-one years prior in Seattle, all happening with young women in the same neighborhood, all killed in the same manner and in the same number of days. Even more mysteriously, the same circumstances apply twenty-one years prior to that, and twenty-one years before those, as far back as 1868. Sounds fishy!

After much digging and some playing around in a big underground city, Kolchak uses his reporter ways to find the truth: a civil war doctor has almost found the secret of immortality. He's created a potion that will give him youth for twenty-one years, and as it begins to wear off he takes on a corpse-like visage, causing him to come back out into the night to steal blood to make a new batch. Sounds like a good deal to me, although I can't quite figure out why he didn't just steal blood from a blood bank or something; even the Night Stalker thought of that. Since the puncture marks were at the base of the women's necks, maybe it had something to do with spinal fluid or something. I guess it's not really important.

What is important is that Darren McGavin rules the world once again as Carl Kolchak, and this TV-movie is filled out with another talented cast, including the eponymous John Carradine. (Carradine was in two-hundred fifty-one movies in fifty-seven years, and had at least appearances in one-hundred and four TV shows. That's a lot of not taking any vacations.) Simon Oakland also returns as Vincenzo, and Richard Anderson plays the Strangler -- I spent the end of the movie wondering where I'd seen Anderson before, and the IMDB tells me that I'm recognizing him from playing Oscar Goldman on the "Bionic Man" series. And he was in "Knight Rider," so I'm probably having nostalgia fits in my cerebral cortex just from checking his resume.

I'll have to be honest: this movie was fun, but it's not as good as The Night Stalker. Stalker was interesting because I really didn't know if the villain was going to turn out to be an actual vampire -- the show was very procedural, and it had me guessing as to whether they'd find out the vampire was real or just a crazy guy who thought he was undead. Going into the second movie, I now know that the supernatural does exist in Kolchak's world, so that some of the underlying mystery is gone; this time it was replaced with the mystery of simply finding out what kind of ghoul he was, and where to find him. It's slightly less engaging, since the endless fights with the editor and police seem like they're more or less retreads of the first movie. After a while, I was getting bored -- the police are confronted with evidence, they want to cover it up, Kolchak saves the day, story gets covered up, everyone gets fired. I saw forty minutes of the exact same thing two days ago, and I would've liked to have seen a new spin on it this time.

Still, McGavin and Oakland really played their roles to the hilt, and once again the screen crackled with energy. There were several scenes of their arguing that had both me and the Lady Retropolitan laughing out loud. ("Where are you going?") I was really impressed by the smallest nuances of McGavin's performance: the tilt of the hat, the foot stomping, and even the way that he stretched himself out on Vincenzo's couch. I think that it was their contributions to the movie that really stood out and made it worth watching, as well as Wally Cox's turn as Mr. Berry, the awkward police researcher that helps Kolchak find the Strangler.

Overall, The Night Strangler is a fun hour and a half, although I'd be lying if I said it was a really solid piece of entertainment. I got bored at more than one point, despite my high praise for the cast. The plot just wasn't very compelling, and the script unveiled the mystery in spurts; there were some loooong trips between plot points, and the majority of it is revealed close to the end. The performances kept me occupied for most of the in-between parts, but it wasn't really enough to keep me focused. In the end, I still recommend it, but with some reservations -- don't expect to be enthralled by the story. Just sit back and enjoy the bickering.