The opening theme is beyond awful. I did not remember it being so bad. But I was just a kid.Originally Posted by 3LockBox
We watched it a lot back in the day, but didn't stick with it. I binged on that a year or so ago on Comet. They run like four episodes a night.
I always found David Duchovny to be one of the most monotonous actors ever. He practically mumbles half the time in this show. And, no, it's not my hearing. I felt the same way in the '90s.
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
Same here. I can't think of anything he has been in that I enjoyed much.
The original Night Stalker film was written by Richard Matheson, one of the best horror writers of his generation -- as indeed was The Night Strangler.
Matheson wrote The Incredible Shrinking Man (based on his own novel), The Pit and the Pendulum, Burn, Witch, Burn (based on a novel by Fritz Leiber), and The Last Man on Earth (the best of the three films based on his novel I Am Legend), though he scripted that one under a passoodonimm... and many others.
For TV, aside from the two Kolchak flickers, he wrote episodes for The Twilight Zone (sixteen of them!), Have , Thriller, The Alfred Hitchcok Hour, Star Trek, and Amazing Stories, plus the tv films Duel (Spielburg's first professional film), Circle of Fear, The Morning After, The Martian Chronicles, and Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story...and many others
Plus, twenty-nine novels, including the ones filmed as The Young Warriors, The Legend of Hell House, Somewhere in Time, and What Dreams May Come .... and many others.
I just looked at the credits for the Kolchack tv series. Of the twenty episodes that were produced, not one was written by Matheson. Nor by anyone else I've ever heard of.
Someday I'll have to check out the series; my movie-watching buddy has it on DVD. But probably not soon...
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
You've never heard of Robert Zemeckis or Bob Gale, the guys who wrote 1941, Used Cars, and the Back to the Future series?Of the twenty episodes that were produced, not one was written by Matheson. Nor by anyone else I've ever heard of.
Or Michael Kozoll, creator of Hill Street Blues?
Or how about David Chase, who's written for The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure and was the creator, head writer and executive producer of The Sopranos?
There were some other writers that had long careers, one of which, Bill Ballinger, wrote for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, won the Edgar award for a teleplay for that show, and also won the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière (Police Literature Grand Prize) for his novel Portrait in Smoke.
The show sucked, yes. But that's not always the fault of the writers.
“From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.” – Philip Marlowe
All of this. Matheson was a great writer and elevated a lot of low budget tv shows and movies that he worked on.
Neil
I haven't seen the Palance 1974 Dracula in ages. Due for a rewatch. I loved the Night Stalker movies and show. And I'm not going to qualify it be saying 'as a kid'. I mean...of course the concept was somewhat limiting and the budget was small, but as a lifelong horror/sf/fantasy aficionado it's still a lot of fun for me.
Neil
In case anyone is wondering, the Night Stalker show is on Me-TV Saturdays at midnight.
I also thought the original title referred to the vampire, but then in the TV series, it apparently referred to Kolchak.
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
Among my wife's all-time favorite shows are Night Stalker and X-Files. I always found the Night Stalker kind of annoying, but that's just me.
The X-Files wore thin with me after 3 or 4 seasons. The show's writers could get a tad self-indulgent with some of the gimmicky, jokey episodes. And what an endless merry-go-round the recurring "alien conspiracy" angle turned out to be. And I agree that Duchovney started 'mailing it in' about halfway through his tenure. You could tell he just wasn't into it anymore. I remember some of his interviews during that time and he thought the "alien conspiracy" thing had started to "spin it's wheels", his quote.
I have seen exactly one episode of The X-Files -- the one with the vampire pizza delivery boy -- and, while I thought it was pretty funny, I had no desire to see any more.
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
I'll stop on the The X-Files occasionally. The earlier 'chasing aliens' stuff wasn't too bad at first, but since it was never brought to a satisfying conclusion, the reruns of it are tedious. And the Y2K paranoia stuff is just plain silly now. But I still like some of those one-off, creature-of-the-week episodes because they're not connected to a recurring side story. There's a purity of intent with those as stand alone incidents that might give you pause, might even creep you out, but don't require you to delve into a labyrinth of conspiracies. Like the episode that delt with inbreeding or el chupacabra or moth man episodes. The cockroach episode is a classic.
I'm at a sports pub. There's baseball, basketball, and hockey on most of the TVs, but on one TV I'm watching..........The Ten Commandments. Haven't seen it in 50 years.
^^ ABC airs it every year, the Passover time of year. They have for decades.
"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"--Dalai Lama
I only saw about 10 minutes of it, then they switched it sucker, er soccer. Soccer's for suckers.I hate it.
But I saw enough to see Anne Baxter....What a fox.
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