EDITOR’S NOTE: This episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker was on the CBS Late Movie on November 16, 1979; August 28, 1981 and December 18, 1987.

As in so many episodes of Kolchak, there are murders throughout Chicago and they have a supernatural feeling about them, as all of the murders were committed with medieval weapons. The big difference is that Captain Rausch (John Dehner) is the first cop who seems like he actually wants to deal with Kolchak.

It also has Minerva Musso (Lieux Dressler), a decorator who has David Bowie lined up as her next client. For now, she’s renovating a home into a disco club and that’s why the knight has come back from the grave, enraged that his ancestral home is being used in such a way and destroying anyone who gets in his way.

Director Vincent McEveety was a TV veteran, directing eight episodes of Star Trek, 11 of Diagnosis Murder, 28 installments of Murder, She Wrote, 18 visits to In the Heat of the Night and movies like Herbie Goes Bananas, The Watcher In the Woods, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again, Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, Gus, The Strongest Man In the World, the original Wonder Woman TV movie, Superdad and The Million Dollar Duck. This episode was written by David Chase, his eighth script for the series, and Michael Kozoll, who went on to write First Blood and one of my favorite TV movies, Vampire.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker didn’t air on the CBS Late Movie because ABC packaged “it with “Demon In Lace” as the TV movie The Demon and the Mummy.

“Among the philosophers, the great thinks and the common Joes of this world, no question is more controversial than truth. Remarkable as it may seem, I can attest that the following events did occur, whether you believe them to be true or not.”

Despite this great starting line from Carl Kolchak, this is sadly near the end of the series. Ramon Bieri returns as a cop, but no one realized that in “Bad Medicine” he was Captain Joe Baker, not Captain Webster. It also has the future Boss Hogg, Sorrell Booke, as a taxidermist named Mr. Eddy.

The story revolves around a 500-year-old Aztec warrior rising every 52 years to claim five victims. The mummified form of this monster of the week is played by Mickey Gilbert, who was also the villain in “The Ripper.” But the real reason to tune in is to see Erik Estrada, just a few years away from superstardom as Ponch on CHiPs, playing Pepe Torres. Estrada dressed as an Aztec priest? I’m here for it. He also has on a pink disco suit and plays the flute in a scene, so this is prime Estrada gold for you to mine.

The cast also includes Dorrie Thomson (Policewomen, Operation Petticoat), Merrie Lynn Ross (Class of 1984) and Sondra Currie (who played Zach Galifianakis’ mom in The Hangover movies).

Basically, this episode is very similar to the aforementioned “The Ripper” while giving us Kolchak versus the Aztec Mummy.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker didn’t air on the CBS Late Movie because ABC packaged “it with “Legacy of Terror” as the TV movie The Demon and the Mummy.

The monster of the week this week is a succubus, a demon who reanimates the corpses of freshly dead women to coerce young men into sexual situations, at which point it sucks the life out of them. And best of all, one of Kolchak’s other enemies shows up, Captain “Mad Dog” Siska, played again by Keenan Wynn. He was last in “The Spanish Moss Murders.”

Illinois State Tech is a wacky school, what with Morticia Adams — Carolyn Jones — as the registrar, Jackie Vernon (the voice of Frosty the Snowman and the star of Microwave Massacre) as a coach and Andrew Prine as Prof. C. Evan Spate, the archaeology professor who Carl tries to pry info about the Mesopotamian demoness out of.

It ends as all episodes must with Carl pretty much alone against supernatural evil, trying to smash a stone tablet with a hammer while demonic winds blow in and threaten to overwhelm him. That said, Spate actually covers for him, which is more than anyone else has done in this series.

Vincenzo has plans to turn the paper into an upbeat and dignified place, which seems to suggest that there’s no place for Carl in that world. I wonder what he would have thought about AI content creation.

Directed by Don Weis and written by Michael Kozoll and David Chase, this also played in syndication as The Succubbus.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker was on the CBS Late Movie on November 9, 1979, August 21, 1981, and December 11, 1987.

Directed by Bruce Kessler and written by Steve Fisher and David Chase, “Chopper” is the kind of Kolchak episode that I love, one where The Bishops biker gang member Harold “The Swordsman” Baker, was decapitated by a rival gang, The Jokers, who were dumb enough to ride around with his head until “The Swordsman’s” ghost came to chop his head off. The gang finally stopped him by putting his head inside his coffin, and everything was normal until a construction project somehow got his head separated from his body.

The old Jokers like Henry “Studs” Spake (Art Metrano) have to look over their shoulders before they lose their heads. Kolchak has to discover the truth, deal with another lousy cop (Captain Jonas, played by Larry Linville from M*A*S*H*) and get out with his head on his shoulders.

Speaking of shoulders, the headless motorcycle rider has shoulders that are a foot above normal. How else would you affect this budget?

Sharon Farrell, who would later be Lone Wolf McQuade‘s wife, as well as Lenore in It’s Alive, Mrs. Mancini in Can’t Buy Me Love and Regina and Samantha’s stepmother in Night of the Comet, is in this episode as is Jim Backus in a cameo as a motorcycle dealer.

Directed by Don Weis (Beyond Westworld, The Munster’s Revenge) and one of several episodes written by Rudolph Borchert, “The Trevi Collection” has Carl Kolchak find out that fashion model Madeline Parker (Lara Parker, Angelique from Dark Shadows) is an actual witch. On the excellent blog It Couldn’t Happen Here, she told writer Mark Dawidziak that star Darren McGavin gave her some advice: “Nobody really understands the style of this thing. It has to be played seriously, and then the horror will come out naturally.”

She’d already been doing that for years in Collinsport.

She told The Night Stalker Companion, “He kept trying to tell me how to play a witch. It was a fun part, but, to be honest, it wasn’t the most fun acting experience I ever had.”

This episode was made when they were halfway through the season, and one assumes nerves were already shot, what with the long hours and low budgets. At least this episode has a fluffy white cat maul and a model named Ariel (Diane Quick). Another, Melody Sedgwick (Beverly Gill), is killed by a shower that gets way too hot.

The one interesting part is that Carl goes from Madeline helping him to her being the villain. This is a different approach to the show’s formula, and while it’s not an episode I enjoy as much as some of the others, I’ll take any Kolchak over most shows.

Sources

It Couldn’t Happen Here…: Mark Dawidziak on The Trevi Collection. https://akolchakaday.blogspot.com/2012/01/mark-dawidziak-on-trevi-collection.html

EDITOR’S NOTE: This episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker was on the CBS Late Movie on November 2, 1979; September 4, 1981 and December 4, 1987.

Directed by Don McDougall (Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge, Farewell to the Planet of the Apes, Forgotten City of the Planet of the Apes) and written by Rudolph Borchert, this time Carl Kolchak discovers that young men are all dying of old age.

Sadly the last episode with Gordon “Gordy the Ghoul” Spangler (John Fiedler) and nemesis Ron Updike (Jack Grinnage) — the show was already canceled — “The Youth Killer” has great casting for its femme fatale. Cathy Lee Crosby is Helen Surtees, a woman using Max Match, the computer dating company she owns, to find men and then sacrificing them to Hecate so that she can remain eternally gorgeous and young. One of those men is Reb Brown, who just a few years later would play Captain America, a fun bit of trivia as Crosby had played Wonder Woman in a TV movie just a year before.

The authority figures in the way of our reporter hero are Sergeant Orkin — that’s Dwayne Hickman, the grown-up Dobey Gillis — and a cop named Kaz, who is played by someone named Demosthenes. That’s the middle name of George Savalas, Telly’s brother.

Carl, as always, goes up against the supernatural menace all by himself and barely survives, leaving behind a statue of Helen and no way to prove any of it. Sadly, this would be the next to last episode.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker was on the CBS Late Movie on September 28, 1979, November 13, 1987 and March 25, 1988.

Experimental biologist Jules Copenik is killed by something so savage that it rips his arm out of the socket. As he worked for the Oceanic International Oil Corporation, that’s big news and draws in Carl Kolchak. This time, he’s fighting with authority again — Captain Maurice Molnar (John Marley) — but that doesn’t stop Carl from meeting PR hack Thomas J. Kitzmiller (Pat Harrington Jr.) and learning more about the research that Copenik was involved with.

Copenik and his co-worker, Doctor Helen Lynch (Katherine Woodville), have been studying Arctic samples that have trapped and preserved single-cell life forms. Carl asks to speak to her, but he is told she was in a car accident and couldn’t speak to anyone.

A photographer named Ron Gurney (Craig R. Baxley) is killed by an ape-like creature currently kept captive. Carl learns the news from his enemy, Ron Updyke (Jack Grinnage) and wonders if he’s part of the conspiracy that permanently destroys his stories. Then the monster escapes, and Carl gets a photo, just in time for Molnar to smash his camera. The ape-man also murders Jeannie Bell from The Muthers and TNT Jackson!

Carl turns to a high school biology teacher, Jack Burton (Jamie Farr), who claims he’s never seen a print like the one Kolchak has of the creature. That means Carl will have to find the beast deep below what was once Chicago Stadium.

One of the victims, William Pratt, is named after Boris Karloff. It’s Karloff’s real name. One wonders, between the DNA being brought back from the Arctic and a character named Jack Burton, if John Carpenter saw this episode.

Director Robert Scheerer also made Ants! while writer David Chase would go on to create the Sopranos, and Bill S. Ballinger wrote the “Firefall” episode of Kolchak and “The Ghost of Potter’s Field” for Ghost Story.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker aired on the CBS Late Movie on July 13, 1979; July 31, 1981 and January 29, 1988.

“I don’t know when exactly I was in this office last. In some ways it seems like I never left. But, no, that’s not right. For at least a few days I was away, far away, in the hands of men with no faces and no names. They broke me down, broke my story down, telling me how it hadn’t happened the way I claimed. At least that’s what I think they did between injections. Memories fade fast enough without chemical help. But if I don’t tell this story now, I don’t think I ever will. Now… what was that date?”

That’s the words of Kolchak that start this episode, one that’s perhaps the closest to the show inspired by Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The X-Files.

Mr. R.I.N.G. (Craig R. Baxley) is a robot that we see kill one of his creators, leaving behind his widow (Julie Adams). The other person who made him, Dr. Leslie Dwyer (Corinne Camacho), has survived. She tells Carl that Mr. R.I.N.G. wants to be human — indeed, he makes his own face out of mortician’s wax — and yet he can’t stop wiping out human life, throwing around stuntmen as only a monster of the week on Kolchak can.

R.I.N.G. stands for Robomatic Internalized Nerve Ganglia, and the automaton doesn’t want to kill unless threatened. That said, it’s been threatened several times, and even when it wants to give up peacefully, that doesn’t happen. Man is more warlike than the machine it created to wage battles. The problem is that Dr. Dwyer has Mr. R.I.N.G.’s human characteristics and feelings, but studying the readings of St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle’s Ethics and finding out you’re a weapon can mess up any robot.

Do you know who made Mr. R.I.N.G.? The Tyrell Institute. One imagines that somewhere, Philip K. Dick is laughing. Well, halfway, as his book Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? doesn’t mention Tyrell, but the movie made from the book, Blade Runner, does.

This episode was directed by Gene Levitt, the creator of Fantasy Island and the director of The Phantom of Hollywood. It was written by L. Ford Neale and John Huff, who also wrote The Hunter’s Moon together.