31 DAYS OF HORROR 2024 - Day 28: THE NIGHT STRANGLER (1973)

Relentless investigative reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) returns. 

Seattle, Washington — 

Having been run out of Las Vegas in the wake of the previous year's Janos Skorzeny vampire murder spree, investigative journalist Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) relocates to Seattle, Washington in search of work. He is once again hired by former boss Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland), who is also now in Seattle, just as young women being turning up murdered. All were strangled, or, more precisely, their necks were crushed by an assailant possessing superhuman strength, and the corpses each feature a small hole at the base of the skull, from which their blood was stolen via a hypodermic needle. 

 

An invulnerable superhuman strangler hunts the nighttime streets.

Kolchak's investigation uncovers a cycle of such slayings every 21 years, beginning in 1868, with the killer operating within a window of eighteen days, after which he disappears for another 21 years, after which the cycle resumes, over and over. Witnesses to the slayings describe the murderer as having a skull-like visage or resembling a rotting corpse, and during a very much one-sided run-in with cops witnessed by Kolchak, the killer is impervious to bullets. Aided by a graduate student (Jo Ann Pflug) who's working her way through college as a belly dancer, Kolchak discovers that the killer is a 19th Century physician named Dr. Richard Malcolm (Richard Anderson), a surgeon in the Union army during the American Civil War, who has mastered alchemy and discovered the Elixir of Life, which grants him immortality.  

But the elixir requires blood from female victims, six to be exact, to remain effective, lest its user begin rapidly aging, and Malcolm is nothing if not savagely relentless in the pursuit of the required component. The trail leads to a final confrontation in the ruins of an underground city, the famous Underground, beneath the living sidewalks of Seattle, where Malcolm proves to be coolly urbane, but clearly and quite homicidally mad, and Kolchak is trapped in his eerie lair, a morbid sanctum that presages the dining room from the climax of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE the following year.

The eternal Dr. Richard Malcolm (Richard Anderson). So what if innocent women have to die horribly to sustain his immortality?

With 1972's THE NIGHT STALKER proving an unexpected ratings smash, a sequel was quickly rushed into production, and THE NIGHT STRANGLER is the end result. It's pretty much a remake of its predecessor, albeit with a shift in location and murderous creature, and as such it's merely okay. Its saving grace is Darren McGavin returning as Kolchak, and he remains as endearing as ever while his efforts are forever scoffed at, frustrated, and suppressed by his boss and hostile authorities. But we have seen this basic setup before, and previously done far better, so despite being-well-made and sporting a script by  returning horror master Richard Matheson, the proceedings are rather dull, though it does come to life during the final act, when the killer relates his history to Kolchak, who has invaded his lair. 

When immortality comes to a sudden halt and time catches up.

My re-watch of this was the first time I've seen this film since sitting through it during a family trip to Atlanta 51 years ago, and I clearly recall finding it entertaining because it distracted me from my parents' endless fighting during the vacation, as it was close to the last legs of their marriage. I liked the character of Kolchak, if not much else about the film, so I was on board when the character was granted his own weekly series, KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER, which lasted for one season (1975-1975). That show was a monster kid's dream, bringing a different monster to the screen with every installment, and I, along with most of the American monster kids of my generation, never missed an episode. I did not see the original THE NIGHT STALKER until I was in high school, and I understood why it was popular enough to warrant a sequel and subsequent series. 

This one's only for Kolchak completists, of which I unabashedly am one, but even I found this to mostly be a slog. I nearly fell asleep on it twice, and I was watching it during an afternoon. That said, you can skip this and miss nothing. I cite it solely for historical purposes, and also to advise you to skip straight to the weekly TV series instead.

 TV GUIDE ad for the film's broadcast premiere.