Kolchak: The Night Stalker

By Ryan Brlecic

The story of Carl Kolchak was never to see the light of day. Jeff Rice, who wrote the original novel that debuted Carl (or Karel in the novel) as a roguish reporter who took on the quest to find The Night Stalker, would eventually get the better of him. Rice would never find a publisher to see the book to print. The story, however, was as stubborn as the character Kolchak and failed to fall into obscurity; finding it’s way to the desks of Dan Curtis and Richard Matheson. The latter of the two wrote a teleplay based on the unpublished novel while the former produced the two-hour made for TV movie. The success in ratings led to the novel finally seeing print and consequently a second direct to TV movie The Night Strangler ( to which Rice wrote a tie-in novelization). A third TV Movie, called The Night Killers was in the works, but the positive demand at the time led to ABC/Universal decision to green light a TV series instead.

Illustration by Ryan Brlecic

Darren McGavin would return to head up the series after and was given an executive producer credit on the show. McGavin not only worked hard to give Kolchak depth, but also created many of the characters that populated the Independent News Service (INS) where he worked. Simon Oakland returned from the television movies as well, playing his editor and only fan Tony Vincenzo.

The series started out strong with a take on Jack the Ripper mythology. As the season would continue the series managed to hit on all major myths and monsters. It became a literal who’s who of Hollywood actors at the time in guest or supporting roles. The show also became a proving ground for talent like David Chase (The Sopranos) and Bob Gale (Back to the Future).

Coming from two highly successful TV films, the series seemed a sure hit. But the show faced unfortunately dismal ratings. The impact the show made despite its brief airtime is most assuredly attributed to the limitless charm and reality McGavin brought to the character of Carl Kolchak. He was our in, he was us and he questioned the things that on any other day we would count mundane or coincidental. More often than not this got him knee deep in a Chicago sewer, swamp root firmly in hand, attempting to fight off a bog monster.  He put it all on the line for the people that would never find out the truth, and would never even give him a simple “thank you” for saving their lives. Never without his recorder, camera, straw hat, rumpled suit, and an elaborate excuse to be somewhere he was not supposed to be Carl was fearless in pursuit of truths that would never see print.

Long before he joined a small pantheon of amazing on-screen fathers with his turn in A Christmas Story, it was McGavin’s voice that led you through the stories each week. It was his disjointed cool that effortlessly navigated the ever revolving police chief foils. McGavin’s Carl Kolchak was the guy who sat next to Steve McQueen’s Cooler King (The Great Escape) in school and dated his ex-girlfriends. No matter how ridiculous the solution, Kolchak could match it. He could find a silver bullet on cruise ship, locate a special swamp root at 2 AM, or beat the devil at politics. His skill was as unmatched as his foolish bravado.

This show and McGavin in particular would serve to inspire numerous influential projects in their own right. A series of Comics from Moonstone, The Dresden Files, Fringe, and Supernatural are some examples. Most notably, the series gained an acknowledgement by Chris Carter that Carl Kolchak was the sole inspiration for his show The X-Files. McGavin would get the honors of making this official with his portrayal of Agent Arthur Dales, the originator of the FBI’s so-called X-Files. He would play father to Millennium’s Frank Black, Adam Sandler’s Billy Madison and even Murphy Brown. He remained woefully underrated throughout his career as an actor who never failed to bring something you immediately familiarized with and yet still always found interesting and new. McGavin would ask to leave the series with two episodes to film, citing that he had grown weary of the monster-a-week pace the show had fallen into. The network obliged his request.

In 20 episodes (all of which you can access via Netflix), Carl Kolchak strives to find the truth behind events. The kind of facts that you need to read between the lines to discover. A thankless task of being burdened by the things that the oblivious public would just walk past while we wallow in our ignorance (willingly or not). Misunderstood and often misrepresented, Kolchak’s only friend was the truth and it was ours to discover with him weekly in 1974. But for Carl Kolchak, more often then not his stories never saw the light of day.

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Dear Summit Entertainment,

You have recently announced that the final book in the Twilight Saga Breaking Dawn is to be adapted as a film. There is even the possibility of it being broken up into two films a la Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. As I’m sure you’ve seen around the internet, this is a brilliant idea. It will make you a boatload of money, and you will be able to package and repackage these films every Christmas for pretty much eternity.

There have been other, better writers that have weighed in on why Breaking Dawn should be adapted to film. I don’t want to retread their ground. I won’t get into the story specifics like a werewolf falling in love with a freshly pulled from the womb baby. Or the vampire fang C-Section that leads to said love affair. Or the incredibly violent sex scenes between Edward and Bella. These things are tailor made to be projected on the big screen, and I cannot wait to see Kristen Stewart attempt to play a character whose apparent only goal in life is to die and be reborn a vampire, and to be thrown around and smashed apart as much as possible in the meantime.

No, I’m not going to tell you why I think this movie would be brilliant, and why its a necessity that you make it. You have your own very lucrative reasons. What I would like to point out though is how, for the first time probably ever, you could completely ignore the fans of the series and make even more money out of it.

It’s no secret that only the twi-est of the twi-hards are in love with Breaking Dawn. It’s violent, it’s sadistic, it’s messy, painful, and embarrassingly anticlimactic. They have spent their time and money on the budding and established romance between two characters for the last half decade. And then they get to watch them both tear each other apart. And watch a werewolf fall in love with a bloody pulp of a freshly released humpire. The fans of Twilight don’t need this last chapter told to them. The following is how you can make the final movie in The Twilight Saga as bloodily brilliant as possible, and still make your money.

Eclipse, I believe, is still shooting with David Slade. The last movie ended with the cliffhanger of a wedding. Simply move the marriage of Bella and Edward (Spoiler? Really?) from the beginning of Breaking Dawn to the final scene of Eclipse. End the film with Alice’s precognitions of Bella and Edward’s life together. Show their honeymoon, their married life, and their life with their daughter Renesmee. It ends happily ever after, and all the women who paid to see the film will leave completely happy, satisfied, and willing to purchase the trilogy when it comes to DVD and Blu-ray.

Which leaves you with the ample opportunity to turn Breaking Dawn into a hard-R, disgusting romp that sets its box office sights on the people that hate the Twilight Saga. I can pretty much promise that for every twi-hard, there are two people that cannot stand the fact that this series of books has choked out pop culture for the last two years. Delivering a movie to those people that is exactly faithful to the book would be a marketing stroke of genius.

Storyboards for the (hopeful) Breaking Dawn adaptation.   *credit to Minelaaa

Not only are you guaranteed an opening weekend for the record books from the same people that made the first few films into the phenomenon that it is, you have the added bonus of word of mouth. As more and more people start complaining about how insane and uninhibited the violence is in the movie, you will start seeing the people who would never be caught dead in a Twilight movie queueing up for a ticket. A chance to see a vampire fuck a human into obliviousness? Yes.

Add to the fact that it has become increasingly clear that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart enjoy playing these roles very little (and given the zero percent depth they have, who can blame them?), and a chance to go ridiculous nuts destroying them would bring a vigor not yet seen in the making of these movies.

Just please, do not bring Chris Weitz back. His influence on New Moon had zero to do with its financial successes. To do Breaking Dawn right, you need someone with an absurd sense of vision and purpose. Someone who is not afraid to get things messy and tell a story on a red-colored set. I am not an internet journalist who thinks he can hire a director as well as a studio can – You won’t be seeing me pimp Jackson and Burton here. Cronenberg maybe (doubtful), but the only hint I will let slip is for whomever is in charge of production to watch a French film called Inside. The two men behind that minor macabre masterpiece know how to mix light, staging, CGI, and gallons of blood to great effect. The budget there was relatively small. Imagine what the outcome would be with the cashflow you’d be able to provide them.

It’s an easy formula: You Fistful of Dollars the audience. On one end, you’re simply providing an entirely accurate portrayal of Stephenie Meyer’s words. On the other hand, you are telling the rational, intelligent people who hate Twilight to come on in – we’re taking the characters you hate and throwing them in a meat grinder for a couple hours. The plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity.

Please Summit. Give us a chance to believe in you. Provide the twi-hards with a trilogy that satiates all of their needs in a tween-romance tied package. And then, give the rest of the world a release. Give us one movie that lets us vicariously rip apart this whole terrible phenomenon. We need blood, and the book gives it to us. All I’m asking is for you to make the movie the book demands. A movie that would make Paul Naschy and Ruggero Deodateo  jealous of its depravity. You can do this. I believe in you. And I’m willing to back it up with a ticket purchase.

Sincerely,

Tom Nix
Editor, The Red Circle.

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Long Good Friday 008: Cerebral Horror

By Ryan Brlecic

1.) Ghost Story, 1981 dir. John Irvin

Ghost Stories are defined by the following characteristics: a piece of fiction or drama, an account of an event, that includes a ghost, or simply the premise that those involved believe the possibility of ghosts and their involvement in the preceding events. From there one can go on to further classify “the ghost story”.

A traditional ghost story is full of the trappings from a romanticized era with a prose style that is characteristic of the gothic tradition. These are favorite of “The Chowder Society” from Peter Straub’s novel Ghost Story and John Irvin’s film of the same name. A group of aging socialites that gather to tell tales of the supernatural as portrayed by similarly aging screen legends like Melvyn Douglas, Fred Astaire, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

The death of his twin brother brings Don Wanderley as played by Craig Wasson into the harmless exploits of his estranged father, a member of aforementioned chowder society. It is only after he gets deeper into the facts about his twin brother’s untimely passing and the connection to a woman from all of their pasts that he begins to unravel their shared ghost story.

Although thought to lack the impact of the novel’s reveal at the end, Irvin’s film version of Ghost Story lives up to it’s namesake. The idea of men competing with their tales of ghost stories reveals a refusal of a definite end and lack of closure’s comfort. When Wasson’s “Don” gives you an outsiders perspective on the group, only then do you begin to realize that they all are trapped inside a bigger story. The theme of running from decisions made in one’s past, like any good traditional ghost story come back to haunt them.

2.) The Others, 2001 dir. Alejandro Amenabar

A psychological ghost story has emphasis that lies in the perceived consciousness of the victim, instead of the actions of the ghost. In The Others, it is the slow descent of madness that Nicole Kidman and her children face that causes them to lose touch with the sanity of the outside world, currently embroiled in uncertainty of world war. Director Amenabar illustrates this by subtly covering the surroundings of their estate with a thick dense fog as the film progresses to mirror their isolation from reality and trap them in their mind’s eye.

Kidman is further trapped by her children and their photo-sensitivity illness. Her character endures, while the world outside grows farther everyday. She lives with the uncertainty of her husband’s return from the front by losing herself in her rules. Further trapping her family with an almost insane set of rules to protect the children from their medical affliction. Making them literally prisoners in their own home. She stops just long enough for the arrival of hired help. It is with the coming of these others that she begins to see the unraveling of her precious rules and with them her life and those of her children.

The Others is a well made meditation on the trappings we put on our everyday lives when we fall prey to our own fears. The way Amenabar uses elements of classic Victorian ghost tale to pepper his study of a woman so consumed by having her life in order only to see it falling apart around her is welcome. Not a huge fan of Ms. Kidman, I have to give her credit for a solid turn in her portrayal of a woman grasping to her sanity in an insane world.

All the above being said this film is also very unconventional in its resolution and definitely worth watching for how its story unfolds. Just keep telling yourself it’s all in your head.

3.) The Sentinel, 1977 dir. Michael Winner

The antiquarian ghost story was birthed from more folklore beginnings and shares close ties with the traditional ghost story. It does away with romanticized prose of the traditional school, favoring realism and gentle escalation of horror. It can be known to involve the disruption of some ancient medieval relic or rite as a catalyst for events. In Michael Winner’s film The Sentinel, based on a novel by Jeffery Knovitz, we follow the story of a young fashion model who slowly watches her life spiral out of control when she takes up residence in an old brownstone.

Winner is of the class of Sam Fuller and Don Siegel. He is a director who has more than a few genuinely good films, but never any real mainstream success. In other words you probably never heard of him. This film was his lone endeavour into the horror genre and to the contrary had a cast packed with familiar Hollywood faces of the time. His style of film-making and the backdrop of New York in the late seventies added a level of authenticity to the piece.

You literally experience the plot with the main character as she moves through her world unaware that it is growing darker. Starting with the rejection of a marriage proposal, she sets out on her own finding herself at the brownstone. There you experience the tenants through her as she goes about her daily life; all played beautifully by character actors of the time.

She comes to entertain their eccentricities and discounts them as harmless as she continues a naive existence. Her off and on fiance’ begins to grow worried when she falls ill frequently and starts hallucinating. Nothing, however, prepares either of them for the secret that the old blind priest on the top floor holds; one that has an answer for her past and her future.

This is solid film with well played out scares. Michael Winner gets a great performance out of the relative newcomer Cristina Raines. Her lack of feature film experience most likely helped her portrayal of a naive women coming into her own whilst unaware she’s being manipulated. Jeff Goldblum, Ava Gardener, Burgess Meredith, Christopher Walken, and TRC favorite Eli Wallach are just some of the people accompanying her in The Sentinel.

TRC Certified Genius

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The Long Good Friday: Underseen Early 2000s Indie Horror

by Tom Nix

In semi-continuation of our first Out of Obscurity column, this week’s Long Good Friday features a trio of recent independent horror films that simply didn’t get an audience. These flicks deserve more eyes.

May // 2002 // dir. Lucky McKee

May is a socially inept, shy, kind of off girl. Growing up with a mentally and verbally abusive mother who wouldn’t even let her take her doll out of its glass casing to play with, May has always been a little awkward.  She has a lazy eye, and her doctor suggests she wear an eyepatch to correct her vision. Needless to say, this doesn’t get her any friends either.

Some one once told her that if you don’t have any friends, make a new one. And that’s what May does. She meets a whole group of new people, and even starts to fall in love. But her oddness prevails. These people eventually turn their backs on her in her 20’s just as they did when she was small.

May decides then and there that none of these people were perfect for her. Only parts of them were perfect. So, naturally, she starts killing them and cutting them up to make a life size doll out of their perfect parts.

May is a genuinely disturbing movie, with an incredible anchoring performance by Angela Bettis. The movie, shot for $500,000 by a first time director, is comfortable with blasting through barriers that would normally be considered taboo, even now. In addition to some shockingly effective gore (this movie looks like it cost 8 times the actual budget), this movie features lesbian trysts, self-mutilation, and irreversible damage to blind children. It also features what is probably still the creepiest and unexpected ending in a horror flick in a good while. May is the real deal.

Love Object // 2003 // dir. Robert Parigi

Certainly the most deserving of the “indie” tag of this week’s title, Love Object is an eerily effective no-budget flick about the dangers of falling in love with a sex doll. Yeah, that’s right. Long before Ryan Gosling took the love of a rubbery broad to pseudo mainstream audiences with Lars and the Real Girl, Robert Parigi was examining the psychology (emphasis on the psycho) of a relationship in which only one of the participants has a heartbeat.

The movie tracks Kenneth, an awkward technical writer at a firm that specializes in electronics manuals. He is eventually assigned to a big project with the attractive new temp, Lisa. Unsure of how to approach and entice her, Kenneth instead orders a sex doll that is tailored to look exactly like Lisa and begins living out what he imagines is their real life relationship.

With his new found confidence from his new “girl,” Kenneth eventually starts to win over Lisa in real life. And the more time he spends with her, the less time he spends with his doll. And that’s when things get really weird. Sure, the doll begins to get jealous and starts to torment Kenneth’s love life. But the real greatness of the film is how rapidly it pushes past the idea of a homicidal fucktoy and into the true nature of obsession, delusion, and insanity.

I could never call Love Object a great film, but for a movie that is refreshingly DIY, it shows a ton of originality and a fearlessness unmatched by a lot of first time directors. It shies away from the really gory stuff almost out of necessity of conserving the funds for the shoot, but still has the ability to shock with how far it is willing to push the situation developed in this completely psychopathic love triangle. I hope someone gives Mr. Parigi a real budget one day, because the man could be dangerous. I mean hell, he managed to snag both Udo Kier AND Rip Torn for a movie about a man and his silicone sperm depository. Give the man some respect!

Below // 2002 // dir. David Twohy
Written by Darren Aronofsky. Directed by David Twohy of Pitch Black fame. Ignored by everybody.

Below is a taut, suspense driven haunted submarine movie set in World War II. The USS Tiger Shark is an American submarine sent out on a mission to destroy German warships. After a successful attack, the captain of the boat is killed on deck, allegedly by falling overboard attempting to collect a souvenir from the destroyed ship.

The new captain, Lt. Commander Brice (the always reliably great Bruce Greenwood), rescues three people – a British nurse, and two sailors – from the wreckage. They are from a British hospital ship taken out several days earlier.

Shortly after these people are taken aboard, however, strange things start to happen. The crew starts seeing things. The sub starts experiencing unexplained mechanical failures and inconsistencies. Stories are being told that maybe old Captain Winters isn’t quite dead. The sub is constantly trying to steer itself back to the place where the German ship was destroyed.

Below may not actually be as independent as the rest here. It features a full submarine set, lots of explosions, a huge cast, and some crazy CG effects. What it does share with the rest is that it is a genuinely unsettling flick. The tight, cramped, uncomfortable spaces of a WWII submarine are even smaller and more terrifying when the unexplained is happening all around. The movie makes very little use of blood and gore, and instead opts to use these cramped quarters as well as just the appropriate amount of atmosphere to give the viewer the creeps.

Very few things are what they seem in the world of Below. It even features a very restrained and complete performance by Zach Galifianakis as the boat’s resident “mystic.” Below was notoriously included in the Dimension Films Fall Dump of 2002 with a little flick called Equilibrium. They both were treated to about 50 screens for two weeks.

But unlike that other film, Below is actually worth watching.

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his own Halloween Countdown: A Homage to Horror Illustration. His portfolio can be found here.

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Learn more about Steve Ditko here.

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By Tom Nix

I’m not one to believe in an Omen / Exorcist debate. Both films can be enjoyed on their own merits, and they approach a similar subject from totally differing points of view. Demonic kids have been a staple in cinema for a while, but the thing that William Friedkin accomplished in this film that sets it apart is that there is a genuine concern for the girl being possessed.

And in this way, it is less a film about the Devil as it is about a family falling apart from uncontrollable circumstances. It’s about the sacrifices a mother will got through for her daughter. It’s about the difficulty of having faith in the face of a demon. Across the board, the film is flawless. The performances by Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair are career defining and the priests played by Max Von Sydow and Jason Miller have become part of pop culture.

Not to say that the whole film hasn’t. The head spin and the pea soup have been used and abused since their introduction here. It’s a film of unequaled power and influence. The film’s scares are undoubtedly visceral. There is not a lot of suggestion in the execution of The Exorcist. All of the worst parts of the film are there right on the screen. We get to see the most blasphemous use of a crucifix in bloody detail. We get to see a spinal tap in uncomfortable closeups. We get to see all of the pus and blood oozing out of a nine year old girl’s body. The brilliance is that none of this feels exploitative. It’s all part of servicing the story and scaring the hell out of every audience that sits before it.

And what a story. From a family drama, to a detective story, to a crisis of faith, to a balls to the wall horror flick all in two hours. One of the most impressive parts of the film is its ability to tell that incredibly dense story through its characters. There is almost zero exposition in the film, and all of the plot points and events unfold as naturally as possible. Combine that with the subliminal image embedded editing, and career best work from William Friedkin,* and The Exorcist is a film that never loses impact, no matter how many times you’ve seen it, and no many how many years have passed.

*I am convinced that his lack of success in later years is due to increased human rights. During the making of The Exorcist, he slapped a man to tears, pulled a gun on another, and nearly broke his lead actresses back.

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By Tom Nix

George Romero was already adept at making societal commentary through the eyes of the undead in 1977 when Dawn of the Dead was released. The original (and, really, it can pretty much lay claim to that term across all the levels) Night of the Living Dead took a sharp left turn at the end to use the zombie apocalypse as metaphor for racism. While there were a couple other insights placed throughout that film, they all had a narrow focus.

Dawn, by making the primary setting a shopping mall, takes a very broad look at entire culture. Although, to be fair, in the 70’s it was more of a subculture. Malls didn’t captivate the huge percent of the population that they did in the late 80’s and 90’s and still do now. While the film isn’t really that frightening – the zombies are little more than people painted grey – it sets up two very specific things. One is the extreme brutality on display. Tom Savini does some his best work on this picture, allowing guts to be pulled from bellies and the scalps of zombies to get ripped off. The other is an actual sense of what the end of the world would be like.

Here are four people trapped in a mall, with all the luxuries that would provide. Some of them are lifelong friends. Others are in relationships. These are people that enjoy being with each other. This all ends quickly. Having for fortify the acreage of a supermall combined with the prospect that virtually everyone you know is dead or undead makes for a pretty drowsy cocktail. Hope has been vanquished. There is just survival.

The movie clocks in at almost 140 minutes in length, all of them necessary. This is not a world of fun zombie killing and mall sex. This is a world of staring the enemy in the face every day and sweating just to see the next. The film features so many classic and copied scenes that first time viewers may be a little confused as to the reputation this film has built up. I can assure you, it has earned it.

Seldom does a movie splice biker/zombie deathmatches with long stretches of despair. Seldom, because few filmmakers would ever conceive of mixing these two horror staples. Seldom, because there are no other filmmakers like George A. Romero. Especially during this exact time during the 20th century when he took all of a humanity through a journey that told them there is no more room in hell.

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