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.
