Author: DOuG pRATt

Kolchak’s First Night Shift

Ah, made for TV movies. They’d been around since the early days of television, but they became a regular thing in the Seventies. Especially the ABC Movie of the Week. Duel, directed by Steven Spielberg, is not only the best remembered, but the one that’s most worth watching today.

Some movies were, or became, pilots for a TV series. So it is with The Night Stalker, the first appearance of Darrin McGavin as Karl Kolchak, that aired two months after Duel.

Who doesn’t love a good vampire movie, especially with this star-studded supporting cast of excellent actors: Carol Lynley, Ralph Meeker, Kent Smith, Charles McGraw, and Elisa Cook, Jr. Claude Akins also appears, but he wasn’t an excellent actor.

Carol Lynley was also excellent in other ways. The times being what they were, a few years earlier she felt free to bare all in Playboy. That was the year she was in the Otto Preminger movie Bunny Lake is Missing.

Carol Lynley, age 22, in Playboy, March, 1965

The Wrightson Stuff

Wrightson “Sonny” Tongue was a founding member of the Sixties band The Hello People. Along with tastewar, I worked with his brother for many years. Tongue is on the right.

If ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ was a concept album, The Hello People took the idea one step further by being a concept band. They wore full-face makeup years before Kiss.

Wrightson continues to make music. He’s been giving AI a try.

Night of the Living Debt

A home equity line of credit is a type of second mortgage. I took one out 25 years ago to do some remodeling.

The HELOC and the mortgage on this place were paid off long ago. The property is now in a real estate trust that is untouchable to any outsider — unless the property tax doesn’t get paid.

The seemingly endless consequences of the Great Recession include foreclosures that are issued without prior notice. Zombie mortgages live!

Return to Turner

Ignite Films is an interesting little video outfit, specializing in meticulously restored independent productions from the past. I have their excellent premiere release, Invaders From Mars.

Ignite’s latest is a film with a title that sounds like it could be a breakfast at Denny’s. The Big Combo, now in the public domain, is a noir title from 1955.

https://www.ignite-films.com/products/the-big-combo

I ordered the regular Blu-ray edition, as my JVC video projector has the 2K resolution formerly known as “full HD.” Did you know that the 3-chip DLP projectors in movie theaters are “only” 4K? That’s right, your 4K TV at home has the same resolution as seen on those gigantic screens.

HBO Max occasionally has some of Eddie Muller’s ‘Noir Alley’ installments from Turner Classic Movies. Here is The Big Combo, in another DogRat simulation of a TCM presentation. My fingers remain crossed that TCM will become available without a cable TV subscription.

The Place to Hyde

On HBO Max I’m watching the outstanding 1931 pre-Code movie, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins. It must be love!

The movie is part of the Turner Classic Movies “category” within HBO Max. Whoever the new owners are of Warner, I would like to see the Watch TCM streaming service become available without a cable TV subscription.