[Inspector Abberline]

The Night Stalker (1972 film)
The first film in what would become a pretty successful TV show of the 1970s, and the first of a pair of groundbreaking TV horror films...While there filmed pretty much like most American television programmes of the 1970s, they look good and are competently made,they're not flashy or have none of the fast-paced editing or cinema special effects style that would come later in 1980s and the 1990s with the likes of Miami Vice and the explosion of sci-fi shows that filled the TV schedules on a Saturday team time and beyond. What really sets the TV films and Kolchak: The Night Stalker series is apart primarily down to the writing skills of Richard Matheson who did the films, and this was carried on into the series by various other writers who kept to the same style...But most of all the success of the shows has a lot to do with the late great Darren McGavin as Carl Kolchak, the wisecracking but down at heal news reporter, who seems to be the only reporter who manages to come across anything weird..The other long-running character from the films who made into the tv series is Simon Oakland as Kolchak's long-suffering editor Tony Vincenzo, who unfortunately for him has to take the brunt of any trouble that Kolchak causes with the police or anybody in authority, which is pretty much every episode..The Night Stalker (1972 film) is a modern,(well for the time) updating of the vampire legend, which they would return to in the series episode The Vampire...While by today's standards the horror is very lightweight, the story is still interesting enough, and again the performances of McGavin and Oakland and their on-screen chemistry really add to the quality of it all..We also have a great supporting cast in Carol Lynley, Ralph Meeker and Claude Akins...The films and tv series are some of the best telly of the 1970s and highly rewatchable.