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Tuesday, October 04, 2005 ( 10/04/2005 11:38:00 AM ) Bill S. "I DRIVE AT NIGHT" – Like many horror fans, I've had mixed feelings about the idea of an updated version of The Night Stalker: the original Dan Curtis production is one of those nostalgic touchstones that you hate to see defaced by a slipshod re-imagining. But to a certain extent Hollywood has always been about cannibalizing and remaking itself, and the practice hasn't always yielded disastrous re-takes. (The Maltese Falcon, for example, was lensed twice before John Huston's definitive Bogey version, with much less time elapsing between remakes.) Still, in an era where revisionism seems to've surpassed fresh creativity and the shocks of my youth keep getting retold in slicker forms (I'm dreading the remake of The Fog), I was feeling pretty unsure about Frank Spotnitz's new take on rumpled ol' Carl Kolchak. But any discussion of the original Kolchak should probably begin with an essential distinction: between the first permutation played by Darren McGavin in two TV-movies (The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler) and the "Brilliant But Cancelled" teleseries that followed in their wake. As scripted by Richard Matheson and directed by Curtis, the movie-length Kolchak adventures are fairly straightforward horror adventures. The subsequent series, though still starring McGavin, was frequently a more tongue-in-cheek affair: the actor remained unsurpassed as the anything-for-a-story hard-luck free-lancer, but some of the scripts could be pretty damn silly – like an early Bob Gale & Bob Zemeckis offering about a headless motorcyclist. Since the new Stalker is being overseen by a writer who'd worked on the Kolchak-indebted X-Files, I was pretty certain from the onset that the model they'd be working from would owe more to the movies than the series. And from the opening segment (our hero driving through the darkly ominous L.A. streets, telling us in voiceover about "stories of strange deaths, endless suffering, and horrors" beyond imagining), it was obvious that this was the tone the show was striving for. Hired by old buddy Tony Vincenzo (Cotter Smith) to be a night reporter for the L.A. Beacon, Kolchak (Stuart Townsend) drives around the city, listening to his police scanner with a particular ear for anything that's out of the ordinary. The first crime our hero happens upon takes place in a half-finished housing development named Sunrise Vista: there, a young-&-pregnant housewife has been brutally murdered by something not quite human, though, of course, the police immediately start suspecting the woman's husband. Carl knows different, of course, but unlike the original series, he keeps his theories close to his chest. Turns out our hero has his own dark secrets – which connect to the unsolved murder of his wife back in Las Vegas (setting for the original Night Stalker movie) and a mysterious mark that appeared on her wrist – which has made him the object of F.B.I. scrutiny. His new colleague Perri Reed (the trés statuesque Gabrielle Union) isn't sure how to take this man who seemingly knows too much too quickly, and since they're competing for the same stories, we can understand her ambivalence. (To the F.B.I., he's still a murder suspect.) Young Jimmy Olsen-esque photog Jain (Eric Jungmann) doesn't share her qualms, though. The murderous somethings, which could be either dogs or wolves (we're never given a definitive answer), turn out to be held up in a cave not too far from the housing development. After they carry off the murder victim's young niece (a nicely developed sequence that steals a visual joke from Joe Dante's The Howling), our journalistic trio ultimately winds up descending into that cave. By now, most of the savvier parts of the audience are going, "Didn't I see this scene umpteen times on X-Files?" To which all the sleazy males in the audience reply, "Yeah, but Gabrielle Union shows more leg than Gillian Anderson!" And, make no mistake, the biggest difference between today's Stalker and the original is a cosmetic one. Where the original Carl Kolchak was a middle-aged sartorial disaster, barely scraping by in a dead-end job, this new version fits the standard unshaven male eye candy mold. On the first teleseries, the only women we saw working the night shift were plump and frumpy, nowhere near the late-nite Brenda Starr played by Union. Heck, even Tony V., the editor who hires Kolchak in spite of the man's past, looks nuthin' like the fat 'n' dyspeptic editor first played by Simon Oakland. When even the grumpy editors are required to look handsome, you have to wonder whether our capacity to fantasize isn't being thoughtlessly curtailed. Too much emphasis on looks-for-looks-sake works against the scares – if the only ones to put themselves in danger are a bunch of Hollywood glamour-pusses, then what've I got the worry about, after all? And how does a recently hired night reporter get a house in L.A. with a pool, anyway? In the end, I wound up neither feeling incensed by Night Stalker's remake nor all that enthused by it either. If the Spotniz Version lacks the campiness of the monster-a-week Dan Curtis teleseries, it also misses the hard-boiled cheekiness that McGavin brought to the character. Where the original movies and teleseries were narrated to us by Kolchak – the reporter telling his Strange and Unusual Stories to anyone who would listen – the new version saves the voiceovers for the opening alone. Now our hero is really more concerned with finding out the truth behind the forces responsible for his wife's death than with writing about Dark Secrets that They Don't Want You to Know. Perhaps it's easier these days for audiences to believe in a reporter with a hidden personal agenda than in one committed to pursuing the truth at all cost? Now that's truly scary. # | |
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