We’ve got a fun selection of werewolves and vampires this week, starting off with 2025’s “Wolf Man.” We’ll stop by for a visit with “The Boys from County Hell” (2020) and see a “Funny Man” (1994). We’ll then pick on the crazy “Dracula’s Dog” aka “Zoltan: Hound of Dracula” (1977) and then finish up with “The Night Stalker” from way back in 1972.
And, of course, we have more excellent short films for you!
The latest issue of “Horror Monthly” is now on sale! Check out all the back issues, as well as our other books, with one easy link: https://horrormonthly.com
Pick up our newest book, "The Horror Guys Guide to the Academy Awards of Horror" at https://www.horrormonthly.com/horror-guys-guides/academy-awards-of-horror
Get all our reviews once a week: https://www.horrorweekly.com
Mainstream Films:
2025 Wolf Man
Directed by Leigh Whannell
Written by Leigh Whannell, Corbett Tuck
Stars Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth
Run Time: 1 Hour, 43 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This has a pretty minimal set up at the beginning and then gets right to things abruptly. Then it doesn’t let up. Overall, we both liked it. It was similar enough to other werewolf movies to be comforting and familiar, yet different enough to be interesting.
Spoilery Synopsis
We’re told that in 1995, a hiker went missing in the mountains of Oregon. Several members of the community speculated that the man had contracted an animal-borne virus they called “Hills Fever.” The indigenous people there called it “The Face of the Wolf.”
Grady, a father, and young son, Blake, go out hunting in the mountains. The man warns his son about not eating the mushrooms. When they spot a deer, Blake runs off alone to track it. He sees something scary, but his father is even scarier. They hear something roaring out in the trees and hide in a deer blind. It’s all very tense, but the creature eventually leaves. Blake and his father go home, and Grady calls a friend on the radio. “I saw it. The face of the wolf. It’s real.”
Thirty years later, we see grown-up Blake and his daughter Ginger, in the big city. Wife Charlotte comes in with Blake’s father’s legal paperwork in the mail: he has inherited Grady’s estate after Grady has finally been officially declared deceased. Blake hadn’t spoken to his scary father in years, and he regrets that now. Blake and Charlotte are having some marital issues, and he wants to work harder to work that out. He suggests the family go to Oregon and spend the summer on the family farm.
On the way getting turned around, they meet Derek, someone he knew when he was really young. Right off the bat, Derek warns them not to be out after dark. Charlotte doesn’t like Derek because he has a gun (he was out hunting). Derek warns them that it takes a special “type” to live out here, with the animals and diseases and stuff. Derek rides along to guide them to Blake’s dad’s farm.
As they talk, they almost hit someone in the road and crash the truck they’re driving. The truck comes to rest stuck in a tree on its side, and it’s also very tense, even more so when a strange animal comes out of the woods, scratches Blake, and drags away Derek’s unconscious body after ripping his belly open. The three run to Grady’s farmhouse as something growls behind them. They barely get inside before it comes pounding on the door.
“It sounded like an animal, but it was standing up on two feet, like a person,” Blake tells Charlotte as he barricades the door. Blake spits out a tooth, thinking he hit his face on the steering wheel in the accident. Charlotte notices that his arm has a big scratch on it, like from an animal. The city-slicker family is not coping well with life in the mountains.
As his family sleeps, Blake notices his hearing has gotten a lot better. A lot. It’s overwhelming. The creature is still pacing around outside the house and reaches through the doggy door to grab Blake’s leg, but Charlotte drives it away. He passes out, and Charlotte tries to use the CB to call for help.
Blake wakes up, and he’s not looking so good. He talks in growls, and his face is a little off. His hair starts falling out and he starts getting worse very quickly. He can’t understand her words, and everything starts looking different to him visually; his senses are going crazy. He starts chewing on his own wounded arm, and Charlotte comes to the conclusion that’s just not right.
Charlotte sees Grady’s old truck parked outside, and she takes everyone outside to try to get it started. She’s smart enough to take a spare battery to jump-start the old truck, and when she does, they get a good look at what is clearly a Wolf Man.
The three run and hide on the roof of the plastic-sheeted greenhouse, and we know where this scene is going to play out right away. Blake runs away as a diversion so that Charlotte and Ginger can run back to the house. When they let Blake into the house a bit later, he’s clearly gotten worse– he’s lost more hair and his teeth have grown longer.
Except then the Wolf Man from outside gets in, and the two wolf men fight. Charlotte stabs the intruder in the back, but that doesn’t stop him. Blake jumps on the monster and bites his throat out, which does the job. Then he sees a tattoo on the monster’s arm– that was Grady, his own father.
Blake stumbles outside and falls down. He continues to change physically, but a lot faster now. Charlotte tells Ginger about Grady’s disappearance a while back, and everyone thought he was dead, but no, he was just sick. Blake returns, and now he menaces his wife and daughter, who hide in the barn.
Charlotte, however, seems to know how to set up a bear trap and uses it to immobilize BlakeWolf. Blake, on the other hand, chews his own foot off to get out of the trap.
Running through the woods, Charlotte and Ginger come across their own wrecked truck and Derek’s ripped-off arm– and his gun. They hide in the same deer blind that Blake and Grady did thirty years ago, and the same scene plays out again. Ginger tells Charlotte that “he wants this to be over.” Charlotte does, in fact, shoot Blake.
The family gets together to watch him die as the sun comes up. Charlotte and Ginger walk out of the woods and admire the mountain view.
Brian’s Commentary
A lot of Blake’s dialogue seems overwritten– who talks to their child like that? Someone who’s never seen a kid? There are a few callbacks to the 1941 film, but not as many as you might expect. I didn’t really spot anything to connect to the 2010 version, but they may have been trying to forget that happened.
There’s no gypsy moon curses here, just a weird animal disease. Most of the film is watching the disease progress, not knowing what the final product is going to be. I was reminded of 1986’s “The Fly” in that regard. The transformation scene, which is usually the best part of many werewolf films, actually takes up the better part of an hour here, as it’s so slow.
Charlotte comes off as a pampered, big-city girl who doesn’t know anything about rural life, but she can jump-start a truck and set a bear trap in the dark.
The “wolf vision” is pretty cool and I haven’t seen it done like this before. The Wolf Man makeup, while probably more realistic in nature, is not impressive at all– it’s basically a dirty-looking man with big teeth.
Leaving out the wolfman’s appearance, overall, I liked it.
Kevin’s Commentary
The slow motion transformation was very interesting, a permanent diseased state instead of changing under the full moon and changing back during the day. The point of view of Blake as he changed, with heightened senses and loss of language skills was cool too. The blend of familiar elements and fresh things was interesting. It wasn’t a perfect movie, but it entertained me.
2020 Boys From County Hell
Directed by Chris Baugh
Written by Chris Baugh, Brendan Mullin
Stars Jack Rowan, Nigel O’Neill, Louisa Harland
Run Time: 1 Hour, 28 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This has an Irish vampire, that supposedly Bram Stoker (who was Irish), based his famous story on. The problem is Dracula is fiction, and this one is real with all different rules that it follows. There was a lot of dark comedy in this one, likeable characters, and gore. We’d call it a winner.
Spoilery Synopsis
An old couple whines about the boring TV. The old woman gets a bad nosebleed, and suddenly, his eyes start bleeding. They are both leaking badly. The door opens, and both of them start screaming…
Two months earlier, at the pub, Claire cuts off Eugene and his friend for non-payment. A couple of Canadian tourists come in, and the boys offer to lead them to the famous cairn safely for a price. The local legend talks about a real vampire who influenced Bram Stoker. That vampire was killed and buried in this very field. The tales say that whenever he came close to people, they would spontaneously bleed. Abhartach the vampire is supposed to be buried under this cairn.
They pull a prank and give the Canadians a scare. The third friend, SP, points out that this whole field is scheduled for demolition and new bypass construction.
Eugene’s father Francie, gets a job working construction on the bypass, and Eugene points out that the locals are going to get really upset, and William’s parents are going to be evicted to make way for the project.
Eugene, William, and Claire drive to town and talk to George, William’s father and local mortician. They show George a skull that they found in a basement on their property.
William confides to Eugene that he plans to move to Australia soon. They get a little drunk at the pub and walk home through the field, fight, and William gets gored by a bull, right on top of the cairn. He bleeds heavily into the stones…
After the funeral, Thomas the bartender refuses to serve SP and Eugene, both because of William and because of ruining the cairn, the only reason tourists come to this little town.
Some time later, construction begins, and George comes to talk to Eugene. George warns him not to tear up the cairn, but Eugene has little choice and knocks the cairn down personally.
That night, Charlie the watchman hears something outside and investigates. Something we don’t see kills him. In the morning, everyone shows up on the site, Charlie is missing, and the cairn has been rebuilt.
That evening, Charlie returns, and he’s not healthy. No one actually sees it because it happens too fast, but they assume Charlie kills Gabriel. Claire kills Charlie, but he doesn’t die easily. Charlie’s got no heart at all, but he’s still not dying, at least until Claire buries him. Nope, he’s still moaning down there. They bury him with stones. That’ll do it, right? They all argue over whether it could be a real vampire.
Meanwhile, Gabriel’s blood runs across the field and into the cairn. The vampire rises from the Earth, so everyone runs to George’s house. Eugene snoops in George’s mortuary and George lets Eugene in on a secret. Turns out, George has a cell in his house, and it’s holding undead William. Yeah, George knows all about the vampires. Meanwhile, in town, people start seeing a strange tall man, and then they start to bleed.
George explains what happened as he was getting William ready for burial. He believes the stones over Abhartach’s grave is what turned William. George admits he infected Charlie with a stone and rebuilt the cairn, leaving Charlie to attack thinking they would have to cancel the construction project. How do they kill a vampire? This isn’t “Dracula,” this is real. The group sets a trap to kill William, but William’s mother gets in the middle of things, and he kills her– and George.
In town, we see the local policeman start peeing blood for no particular reason that he can tell, but we know why.
Back at the mortuary, the gang seals William in one of the coffins. SP, however, gets disemboweled and dies.
Eugene, Claire, and Francie deal with the problem. They bury William, coffin and all under a load of rocks.
In town, we cut to the old people we saw in the pre-credit sequence. They die badly. And others in town are being drained.
Eugene figures out that Abhartach is heading toward his dead mother’s farm, where he found that skull; that must have been his lair. He and Francie head over there and figure out that she had been related to the man who buried Abhartach way back in the day. That means Eugene is the last survivor of that family and Abhartach is going to be coming for him.
Francie knocks out Eugene and beheads Abhartach quite easily. When he goes to wake up Eugene, we see the head sliding across the ground to reconnect with the body. The vampire then comes after both of them all the way out to the barn.
The sun comes up, but Abhartach doesn’t even slow down. Sunlight doesn’t work either. Eugene pulls off Francie’s wounded leg and impales the vampire with it before burying him again.
In the morning, everyone in town wakes up with bloody noses.
Three months later, Eugene admits that he’s finally read “Dracula” and learned that killing vampires with sunlight was a more recent invention. Claire is leaving town for a long while and says goodbye. Francie’s hobbling around with a cane, but he’s doing much better now with a peg leg. Eugene goes to the barn’s basement and puts some more stones on the new cairn.
Brian’s Commentary
This is a unique vampire. Abhartach doesn’t bite people; the blood leaks out and finds its way to him. It’s a whole new vampire story where the regular rules don’t work. The story about Abhartach being the inspiration for Bram Stoker to write “Dracula” is said to actually be true.
It’s a new take on vampires, there’s a lot of humor here. Overall, I liked it.
Kevin’s Commentary
This was cool how all the rules were different and it kept throwing off their plans. I also liked the humans in it and some over the top grossness. It’s a really good one.
1994 Funny Man
Directed by Simon Sprackling
Written by Simon Sprackling
Stars Tim James, Christopher Lee, Benny Young
Run Time: 1 Hour, 33 Minutes
Watch it:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This was completely stupid and utterly funny. We kept watching it thinking that this was awful and laughing out loud in humor at it. It’s very British, spoofy, cartoonish, violent, graphic, raunchy, and very weird. We sort of give it a thumbs up.
Spoilery Synopsis
We open on a high-stakes poker game, and the men playing aren’t too happy with their hands. Max bets $50,000 on his hand, and the others fold except for Callum, the old man in the white suit, who puts up the key to his priceless ancestral home. It’s a $950,000 raise in the stakes. Max has the joker, so he wins. Callum Chance is creepy and makes a threat. Credits roll.
Max, his wife Tina, and their children go to their new mansion in the country. There’s a game room, and we hear Callum’s voice talking about a creepy game that Max has just begun. Elsewhere, John Taylor, a musician and Max’s brother, stops to pick up a hitchhiker on the way to London. He takes too long and ends up picking up four hikers in his bus (Did the Scooby-Doo gang’s van break down again?).
Max and Tina talk about Jammie and Harry having nightmares; she doesn’t like this old castle and wants to go home to L.A. Max agrees to go find a hotel once Johnny gets there. Meanwhile, little Harry looks at a court jester picture in the stained glass window, and we see something breaking up through the floor somewhere in the house.
Harry and the Funny Man play together. Tina walks into “The Love Gallery,” a room as weird as it sounds. The Funny Man comes up behind her, and she wonders what she's been smoking. She backs out of the room slowly and then screams. She finds the room isn't as easy to leave as she had hoped. He eventually beats her to death with a club.
Jammie plays GameBoy in a room, not seeing the Funny Man dancing around behind her. The Funny Man fries her with battery cables.
Max gets high and plays with a deck of cards that are all jokers.
Johnny shows up with his hitchhiking friends, and “The Psychic Commando,” one of the hitchers, senses something is wrong in the house. She does, however, release an ultrasonic scream that makes everyone cover their ears. She then shoots up with some kind of drug which annoys Johnny. The other three Scoobies want to go and leave her here, but Johnny says they can’t leave without her.
“Thelma” says psychic abilities are real before exploring the house to find Max’s family and the psychic woman. Fred and Shaggy take a walk and talk about how weird the whole situation is. Meanwhile, the Funny Man is outside peeing all over Johnny’s truck. The Funny Man plays soccer with someone’s severed head.
Somewhere in the house, Max finds a big pile of cocaine, pounds of it, and gets right down to business. It pops him right up to the chimney on the roof of the house and then for a real ride.
The Psychic Commando finds a nearly eternal stairway down, but eventually makes it to a small town (population 1) at the bottom of the steps. As she explores the Funny Man torments Thelma and literally blows her brain out.
Upstairs, “Fred” goes into Club Sexy, an obvious trap set by the Funny Man. Inside, the Funny Man does a whole skit about “psychedelic wigs” that make Fred boogie down and watch a porn show. This ends up going badly for him.
“Shaggy,”on the other hand, wanders through the catacombs and tunnels beneath the house until the Funny Man traps him halfway inside a wall and halfway in a puppet show that’s mind-blowing.
Through all this, Max continues to ride around the house in his drug-fueled shopping cart. Johnny wanders through the house looking for him, but eventually finds that his brother has sabotaged his career with the Rolling Stones. Max falls out a window to the little magical town below. Johnny then goes back inside to join the greatest rockers of all time, but it’s really just the Funny Man.
Down in the basement town, the psychic and Funny Man have a ridiculous gunfight; he uses pistols, and she’s got mutated hands that shoot fireballs. She runs him out of town, but he does end up getting the last laugh.
Johnny goes on stage with his guitar, and he hears cheering from all around. He’s in “Rock and Roll Heaven,” at least until the Funny Man shows up and literally makes him… a star.
With no one left, the Funny Man finds Max down in the burned-out little town. The Funny Man offers him his card… the joker. We see Callum Chance is a patient there, building houses from cards. Max, on the other hand, is not having as much fun.
Brian’s Commentary
“Duck!” “Where?”
Fans of Art the Clown from the “Terrifier” series would love the Funny Man. I wonder if Damien Leone took any influence from this. There’s even a bit of a resemblance between the two characters.
This was intended to be a full-on horror film, but Tim James’s character evolved during production, and as the filming progressed, they ignored the original script more and more. Supposedly, a lot of the crew were on drugs during the creation of the film, and yeah, it shows. As you might expect, it’s pretty disjointed and all over the place thematically.
Christopher Lee filmed his tiny role in a single day’s shooting. He probably had no idea what the rest of the film was going to be like. He’s in the first scene and then does a couple lines of off-screen narration throughout the film.
The four hitchhikers really were based on the Scooby gang, and the “Thelma” character is so obvious that it’s hard to miss the similarities.
The Funny Man’s mask and design is actually really good; I’m a little surprised that he didn’t get a whole franchise. Some of the characters have accents that are a little hard to follow (as an American viewer), but it’s easy enough to follow what’s going on. Actually, the sets and costumes are both very low-budget looking but also completely appropriate to the story.
It’s objectively a terrible, terrible movie, but I laughed numerous times. If you’re into silly British comedy with a taste of horror, you might just love this. Maybe. You’ll need to come at this one from the “comedy” angle and not get too wrapped up in it being a horror movie.
Kevin’s Commentary
I wanted to hate this movie, but I kept laughing and enjoying it too much. It’s said that they started out making a serious movie but things went off the rails. Funny Man is foul and funny and keeps breaking the fourth wall. I had a good time watching this.
1977 Dracula’s Dog
AKA “Zoltan, Hound of Dracula”
Directed by Albert Band
Written by Frank Ray Perilli
Stars Jose Ferrer, Michael Pataki, Jan Shutan
Run Time: 1 Hour, 27 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
The premise sounds silly, and you might expect it to be funny. It manages to be a serious horror movie with a decent story, tension, and a body count. Reggie Nalder is perfect as the main villain in looks and persona. This is one worth checking out.
Spoilery Synopsis
We open on some soldiers, looking generically communist, practicing shelling in the woods. “Stop blasting; we’ve uncovered a tomb.” They go down into the huge chamber. There are various crypts of members of the Dracula family. They post a guard and leave for the night. Sometime during the night, there’s an earthquake, and the guard hears noises in the chamber. Two of the tombs open and coffins slide out. The guard, never having seen a vampire movie, opens the lid and pulls out the stake that’s in the shroud covered body. Is it Dracula? No- it’s Dracula’s Dog! Credits roll.
We flash back to Zoltan, the dog, back when he was alive. He was a good dog, defending his human owner when Dracula came to bite her. The barking woke up the woman, who screamed and drove the vampire away. The bat, however, bit Zoltan, turning him into a vampire-dog. The dog then pulls out yet another coffin and he pulls the stake out of that body. Zoltan doesn’t wake up Dracula, he wakes up his former owner, Veidt Smith, who says they must go find their new master.
In the morning, the soldiers return with Inspector Branco, here to find out what happened to the almost dead guard. The soldiers carry out the various coffins and open one in front of the major and the inspector. It’s clearly a vampire tomb, and the whole countryside will be terrorized if this gets out. Worse yet, two of the coffins are empty. They burn the coffins and the mostly dead guard as well - he had a heartbeat but wasn’t breathing.
Inspector Branco says Veidt Smith was more of a Renfield than a true vampire. They cannot exist long without their masters. There are no more vampiric Draculas, but there is a Michael Dracula living in America, and Veidt is most likely going to find him. He has no idea who was in the other empty coffin.
We cut to Veidt, aboard a ship, and we flashback to how he got hooked up with Dracula. He has Zoltan in a box in the cargo hold. Customs opens the crate to check for contraband, but there’s just a dead dog inside. Later, we see that Zoltan is vampire fine; he was just playing dead.
Elsewhere, Michael Drake (He changed his name) and his wife, Marla, send their two kids to bed. They let the German Shepherd out for the night, and he’s a good dog too. They’re packing for an upcoming camping trip, and he makes sure to put his gun in the overnight bag.
Zoltan gets on the roof and looks through the window at Michael, asleep in his bed. Veidt tells Zoltan to go in and turn him into a vampire, but a loose roof tile breaks and the Drakes’ dogs go berserk, waking everyone up.
In the morning, the family, including the dogs, pack into the RV and leave the house in the hands of their neighbor, Mrs. Park. They don’t notice the big black Hearse following them. They get to the campground and the family frolics in the weeds.
One of the puppies runs off and gets lost and everyone searches. When the sun sets, Veidt lets Zoltan out of his box. Zoltan soon finds the puppy and kills him. Zoltan’s about to eat the children too, but the German Shepherd runs him off. In the morning, they find the dead puppy. They take the puppy back to their campsite and bury it.
Sometime during the night, the now-undead puppy crawls out of the grave. Zoltan finds a hiker and viciously tears him apart. There’s another camper’s dog, and Zoltan turns him too. During the night, Zoltan and the other dog attack Michael outside the RV.
At the airport, Inspector Branco arrives in the country and rents a car. He goes to the Drake house but only finds Mrs. Parks there. Between her and the park ranger, he works to track the family down.
The following night, Annie, one of Michael’s dogs, encounters a pair of vampire dogs. All three dogs then attack Linda, Michael’s daughter, but she is rescued by other campers. The group hears dogs howling all around them.
Inspector Branco shows up and explains why he’s there. Michael makes jokes; he doesn’t really believe he’s related to Dracula. Branco explains some details that make Michael remember fleeing from angry villagers when he was a child. Branco wants Michael to stay with him in a fisherman’s cabin and send the rest of the family home.
As Branco explains to Michael how to kill a vampire, they hear scratching at the door. The dogs surround the place, even getting on the roof. Zoltan does, eventually get inside just as the sun rises. The dog runs back to his coffin without biting Michael. Branco wonders if that other coffin might have held a dog…
The next night, Branco and Michael go back to the original campground. Over at the Hearse, Veit tells Zoltan, “We cannot survive another night without a master.” Branco soon finds the skull-faced old minion, and they fight. Veidt loses badly and gets a stake.
Three big dogs come after Michael, who rushes to raise the cloth-top convertible before they can get to him. One of the bad dogs is Annie, one of Michael’s former pets. Samson, the other good dog, runs up, and he lets it into the car. Samson, however, is faking the good-dog thing and attacks Michael inside the car as Zoltan and the others watch from outside. Michael ends up staking Samson.
Branco and a hunter arrive to distract the dogs. He stakes the bad dogs, all except for Zoltan, who runs off into the woods pursued by Michael. Zoltan hypnotises Michael to drop the stake. Michael, however, is wearing a cross, and when Zoltan backs away, he falls off a cliff and is impaled far below.
Branco and the hunters stay behind to burn the bodies while Michael goes home. Except… We cut to the vampire puppy, who’s been killing the rabbits in the woods. He’s got yellow glowing eyes.
Brian’s Commentary
It’s a ridiculous concept that’s all played pretty straight here. The dog is always photographed so his eyes are glowing evilly, which is a nice effect. The real villain here is Veidt Smith, who looks like a walking skull. The actor looks halfway mummified without any special makeup.
I seem to remember a lot of “wild dog pack” horror movies that came out around this time. This was one of them, but with a supernatural twist added. It’s a silly idea, but it’s not a terrible movie.
Kevin’s Commentary
This had the potential to be stupid and funny. I was pleasantly surprised by how seriously this was taken, and how well it worked as a horror movie. It’s not a classic of cinema, but it holds up pretty well for entertainment. I’d recommend it.
1972 The Night Stalker
Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey
Written by Richard Matheson, Jeffrey Grant Rice, Max Hodge
Stars Darren McGavin, Carol Lynley, Simon Oakland
Run Time: 1 Hour, 14 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Before there was the TV series, there was this movie. Which was very much like a longer episode of the show to come, including his voice overs that give it a noir vibe. It’s very good, with Darren McGavin nailing the role as a journalist trailing a story of supernatural events that no one else really believes except him.
Spoilery Synopsis
We hear on a cassette recording that there’s been a huge coverup of this story. We cut to Las Vegas, where a woman walks home among the classic casinos. She goes down a dark alley and a man grabs her, bites her on the neck, and kills her. Credits roll.
The coroner swears his associates to secrecy as there’s something very unusual about the girl's body. Carl Kolchak, a reporter, argues with his boss and gets assigned the story. He goes to Vegas to talk to Gail Foster, an old girlfriend and one of the dead girl’s friends.
Not long after, there’s another murder. Sheriff Butcher already knows and dislikes Kolchak, but they check out another dead waitress. Kolchak leaps to some conclusions about the story, and he gets chewed out by Tony, his boss.
There’s another victim, and Kolchak notices a pattern. All the police stop talking about the case. Friend Bernie promises to look into some things for Kolchak, who thinks the killer believes he’s a vampire. He gets a call from the doctor at the hospital. All the blood has been stolen from the blood bank.
There’s a coroner’s inquest, and the coroner says the wounds look like those of animal bites; there’s also human saliva in the wounds. He also suspects that some serial killer out there believes he’s a vampire. Or maybe it’s just a guy who’s “high on pot.” They did get a vague description of the guy who broke into the blood bank. The district attorney demands that the reporters in the room keep quiet about the vampire angle.
“Vampire Killer in Las Vegas” is the headline Kolchak turns in. There’s another victim, the fourth, but this time, there’s a witness, and his police composite winds up in the newspaper. We get a look at the killer this time, bloodshot eyes and all. Kolchak and Tony argue about whether they should report the news or not.
Gail warns Carl that if he keeps it up he’s going to get fired again, and then she lists all the times he’s been fired. She’s got a book about vampires, and she makes him read it, just in case it’s a real vampire. He reads us the “rules” of vampires and how to kill them.
The killer robs a blood bank again, and this time, the orderlies put up a fight. One of them is killed, and the killer does appear to have superhuman strength. The police arrive and shoot the man repeatedly, but he gets away. Kolchak is also there with his camera.
The suspect is identified as Janos Skorzeny. The man is at least seventy years old. He’s got quite a history, going way back in history. Kolchak wants the police to proceed as if he were a real-life vampire. The cops all tell Kolchak to shut up.
The police spot Skorzeny and follow him, and Kolchak hears about it on his radio. The cops shoot him some more, and they do not miss. Skorzeny runs off anyway. Yeah, Kolchak sees that Skorzeny’s a vampire.
The police leadership finally decides to listen to Kolchak’s advice. That is, at least, until he gives it. He’s got crosses, stakes, and mallets. They all know he’s right, they just don’t want to admit it.
One of Kolchak’s informants finds Skorzeny’s house, and Kolchak heads over there first, before the police find out. He knows better than to go there at night, but he’s in a time crunch and has to do it. He sneaks inside and finds bottles of blood in the fridge. He finds a coffin as well, and he photographs everything. Then he finds a living woman chained to a bed who has been being slowly drained of blood.
The vampire returns home and catches Kolchak. Carl, however, has a cross, and it works really well against the fanged vampire. At least until he clumsily falls down the stairs. Just as the vampire gets the best of Carl, Bernie comes in and distracts him. Finally, Carl pulls down the curtain, and the sunlight comes in. The two men gang up on the defenseless vamp and drive a stake into his heart. The sheriff comes in just as Kolchak drives the stake in.
The next morning, Kolchak and Gail talk about getting married. His big news story will allow them to get married and move to New York, where he’ll work for a big-time newspaper again. He goes into the office and turns in the story. Tony accepts the story and says, “You’re one hell of a reporter.”
Then the sheriff arrests Kolchak for murdering Skorzeny. They know he was right, but they want it all covered up, making it look like Skrozeny was just a “normal” serial killer. Kolchak has no choice but to leave town; the cops have even packed his bags. Gail has also already left town.
We cut back to Carl, sometime later, who has narrated a book about the story on his cassette player. He mentions that Skorzeny, along with all his victims, were immediately cremated. We know why…
Brian’s Commentary
The vampire here is just a guy with fangs and bloodshot eyes. He never speaks though, which adds a lot to the mystery.
Half of the story is Kolchak fighting against the authorities who just want to hush up the truth and protect their own image. This was the original influence behind the creation of “The X Files” and dozens of other supernatural TV series. This was a standalone movie, and it did really well, leading to a second movie and an eventual TV series, along with a failed reboot in 2005.
I remember watching the series when it came out, and it’s a huge reason why I got addicted to horror stories.
Kevin’s Commentary
This was great. Darren McGavin is perfect in the role and this is well written. It takes the supernatural and sets it realistically in the real world. It’s the precursor of another movie and series to come that was all really entertaining.
Contact Info:
Email:
Websites:
Share this post