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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 202 из 359So a sequel, The Night Strangler , quickly followed. This time the murders were being committed by a doctor who had discovered the secret of eternal life-always provided he could slay five victims every five years or so to make up a new batch of elixir. In this one (set in Seattle), pathologists were covering up the fact that bits of decayed human flesh had been found on the necks of the strangulation victims-the doctor, you see, always began to get a little ripe as his five-year cycle neared its end.
*The part is really only a refinement of the part of David Ross, a private eye McGavin played in a wonderful (if short-lived) NBC series called The Outsider . Probably only the late David Janssen as Harry Orwell and Brian Keith as Lew Archer (in a series that only lasted three weeks-if you blinked, you missed it) can compare with McGavin's performance as a private eye.
Kolchak uncovered the cover-up and tracked the monster to its lair in Seattle's so-called "secret city," an underground section of old Seattle which Matheson visited on a vacation trip in 1970.* And, needless to say, Kolchak managed to dispatch the zombie medico.
ABC decided it wanted to make a series out of Kolchak's continuing adventures, and such a series, predictably titled Kolchak: The Night Stalker , premiered on Friday, September 13th, 1974. The series limped through one season, and it was an abysmal flop. There were production problems from the beginning; Dan Curtis, who had been the guiding force behind the two successful TV-movies, had nothing to do with the series (no one I queried seems to really know why). Matheson, who had written the two original movies, never turned in a single script for the series. Paul Playden, the original producer, resigned his post before the series began its run and was replaced by Cy Chermak. Most of the directors were forgettable; special effects were done on a shoestring. One of my favorite effects, which at least comes close to the fur-covered VW in The Giant Spider Invasion , was on view in an episode entitled "The Spanish Moss Murders." In this one, Richard Kiel-who would become famous as jaws in the last two James Bond pictures-cavorted through a number of Chicago back alleys with a not-very-well-concealed zipper running up the back of his Swamp Monster suit.
*For much of the material on The Night Stalker , I am indebted to Berthe Roeger's comprehensive analysis of both the two movies and the series, published in Fangoria magazine (issue #3, December 1979). The same issue contains an invaluable episode-by-episode chronology of the series' run.
*The part is really only a refinement of the part of David Ross, a private eye McGavin played in a wonderful (if short-lived) NBC series called The Outsider . Probably only the late David Janssen as Harry Orwell and Brian Keith as Lew Archer (in a series that only lasted three weeks-if you blinked, you missed it) can compare with McGavin's performance as a private eye.
Kolchak uncovered the cover-up and tracked the monster to its lair in Seattle's so-called "secret city," an underground section of old Seattle which Matheson visited on a vacation trip in 1970.* And, needless to say, Kolchak managed to dispatch the zombie medico.
ABC decided it wanted to make a series out of Kolchak's continuing adventures, and such a series, predictably titled Kolchak: The Night Stalker , premiered on Friday, September 13th, 1974. The series limped through one season, and it was an abysmal flop. There were production problems from the beginning; Dan Curtis, who had been the guiding force behind the two successful TV-movies, had nothing to do with the series (no one I queried seems to really know why). Matheson, who had written the two original movies, never turned in a single script for the series. Paul Playden, the original producer, resigned his post before the series began its run and was replaced by Cy Chermak. Most of the directors were forgettable; special effects were done on a shoestring. One of my favorite effects, which at least comes close to the fur-covered VW in The Giant Spider Invasion , was on view in an episode entitled "The Spanish Moss Murders." In this one, Richard Kiel-who would become famous as jaws in the last two James Bond pictures-cavorted through a number of Chicago back alleys with a not-very-well-concealed zipper running up the back of his Swamp Monster suit.
*For much of the material on The Night Stalker , I am indebted to Berthe Roeger's comprehensive analysis of both the two movies and the series, published in Fangoria magazine (issue #3, December 1979). The same issue contains an invaluable episode-by-episode chronology of the series' run.