Monday, July 03, 2006

THE NIGHT STRANGLER (1973)
Dir: Dan Curtis

When movie sequels are spoken of, the tone invariably turns jeering, and smug dismissals are expected from all serious aficionados of the motion picture. And yet our genre of attention here, the horror fim, often gathers steam in spin-offs, unencumbered as it is by the more traditional focus on narrative consistency. The Friday the 13th series didn't introduce the iconic hockey masked figure of Jason Vorhees until Part II (1982). Nearly lovable wisecracking Freddy Kruger only began to really develop his sick one-liner schtick midway through the Nightmare on Elm Street marathon (by which time admittedly he'd devolved into a third-rate Catskills comedian). Similarly, other shlock classics explored more interesting terrain in their sequels, such as Night of the Living Dead (1968), Children of the Corn (1983).

Following the enormous success of The Night Stalker (1972), Dan Curtis and screenwriter Richard Matheson also benefited from returning to the drawing board to craft the excellent sequel, The Night Strangler. Their previous collaboration (they would work again on the seminal Trilogy of Terror ) garnered the highest ratings of any TV movie in over a decade, so expectations should have been low for this hasty afterthought, demanded in part by Nielsen-driven ABC.

Instead The Night Strangler gives us a Carl Kolchak with more motivation, a bumbling, awkward hero beginning to show signs of real life drama under the crumpled suit and battered straw bowler. Again the discredited news reporter is on the scent of a supernatural killer, this time not in seedy Vegas, but a Seattle made seedy despite its verdant exterior. Kolchak's beat is the world of exotic dancers, strip clubs, bums sheltered in abandoned buildings, and this sleazy urban underbelly is given surprising depth and attention here (despite television's preferred idealization of a squeaky clean America). Cameos abound ( The Munster's Al Lewis as a drunk homeless man suffering from hypochondria, Margaret Hamilton chewing scenery in the role of a cantankerous professor of the occult), and the script spends its first half developing mood and tone and nuances of Darren McGavin's Kolchak. The climax is therefore even more unexpected, switching locales as it does to a surreal underground cavern beneath the streets of America's most caffeinated city. Strongly recommended.

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