Review – The Night Stalker

Though the series spawned by this production turned out to be a somewhat uneven set, the original is immense fun. It’s a parade of clichés: the wild-eyed, crusading reporter, the hard-nosed editor, the arrogant bureaucrats, and of course the dark, European vampire. But the old saws are stuck together in ways that make some fresh cuts (or at least fresh by 1973 standards). Darren McGavin stars in one of the two roles that made him famous (the other of course being the dad in A Christmas Story). Muckraker Carl Kolchak bucks the system in order to prove that a string of murders in Las Vegas are the work of something more sinister than a garden-variety serial killer. Some of the scenes are nice and spooky in an early 70s sort of way, something I might like a bit more than I should because in the early 70s I was just the right age to be spooked by stuff like this. Mildly amusing