EDITOR’S NOTE: This episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker was on the CBS Late Movie on June 8, 1979; June 5, 1981; October 9, 1987 and January 15, 1988.

Directed by Alexander Grasshoff (The Last Dinosaur) and written by Zekial Marko and David Chase (the creator of The Sopranos), this episode starts with a gangland slaying committed by a gigantic and unstoppable man and then an even more unbelievable happening. And that’s Vincenzo being friendly to Kolchak, all to ensure that he takes young reporter Monique Marmelstein (Carol Anne Susi) under his wing. She’s important because her uncle is a company bigwig.

Carl saves her from a police shootout with the Russo brothers and then heads to the morgue where his informant, Gordy the Ghoul (John Fiedler), is making bets and selling information. Kolchak learns that all the gang-related deaths have had multiple blunt force traumas to their dead bodies and that one of the other dead people was filled with bullet holes and chicken blood.

It all points to the death of a Haitian named François Edmonds, and the investigation even takes Carl to a voodoo shop owned by Uncle Filemon (Scatman Crothers), which is soon crawling with organized crime figures. He soon meets up with “Mamalois” Marie Juliette Edmonds (Paulene Myers), the mother of the dead man and, as we soon learn, now the undead killer who she can command by writing the names of his victims on tiny coffins. And now Kolchak’s name is on one of them!

This episode has one of my favorite endings. Carl enters a junkyard and has to fill the sleeping zombie’s mouth with salt and sew it shut. It gets wild when the zombie awakens mid-stitch and chases our intrepid reporter through the maze of crushed cars. Sure, Carl stops him, but he does it at the expense of another Rollei 16 film camera.

The zombie is played by defensive lineman Earl “Tree” Faison of the San Diego Chargers, who, at 6′ 5″ and 260 pounds, looks absolutely monstrous next to the much smaller McGavin. Antonio Fargas also appears in this one.

The monsters on Kolchak: The Night Stalker sure do like throwing people through the air, huh?