A Rolling Reporter Gathers Some Moss: “The Spanish Moss Murders”

Now Playing: “The Spanish Moss Murders,” episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker (S1, E9; first aired Dec. 6, 1974)

Pros: Everyman hero Kolchak runs circles around not one but three clueless authority figures in this episode
Cons: The monster design is just average

This post is part of The 11th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode blogathon, hosted by the talented and knowledgeable Terence Towles Canote at A Shroud of Thoughts. This year's offerings run the gamut of TV genres, and have something for just about everyone.

At the height of the New Jersey Drones flap, while thousands were peering into the night skies, unnerved by all the weird lights that made it seem like there was some sort of alien superhighway above their heads, and the Feds were dismissively insisting “there’s nothing to see here,” I was thinking, where is Carl Kolchak when we need him?

Acclaimed physicist and professional skeptic Carl Sagan once famously said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Through two made-for-TV movies and a short-lived TV series, intrepid investigative reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) kept unearthing extraordinary evidence of a parallel, paranormal world undreamt of by sober-minded people, from classic vampires, demons, zombies and werewolves, to such exotic manifestations as shape-shifting entities and headless, sword-wielding motorcyclists.

If Kolchak had been on the New Jersey drones case, there’s no doubt he would have discovered the weirdest, most exotic explanation possible for the phenomenon… like flying, shape-shifting Jersey Devils with neon lights for eyes. 

While Kolchak only got two TV movies and one 20 episode season to dig around the dark underbelly of the paranormal world, his exploits would inspire the far longer TV careers of Mulder and Scully in The X-Files. The key to the FBI duo’s success was their Yin and Yang relationship, where Mulder’s insatiable curiosity and Scully’s innate skepticism formed an effective, if often contentious, team. Plus, the sexual tension between the two certainly helped the ratings. By contrast, Kolchak was always going it alone, relying on his own wits and worn shoe leather to bring it all to light.

Carl Kolchak specialized in shining a light into the dark corners of conventional reality.

Kolchak’s editor and foil at the Chicago-based Independent News Service, Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland) was certainly no help. Week after week, the relentless reporter would glom onto hints of something unworldly, then nose around like a bloodhound until the uncanny secrets were exposed in spectacular fashion -- and all the while, his boss would huff, puff, wince, gnash his teeth, and plead with Kolchak to stop wasting his time. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Carl Kolchak was born out of an unpublished novel, The Kolchak Papers, by long-time Las Vegas resident Jeff Rice. Rice’s agent recognized the novel’s potential, and before long, it was being adapted by producer Dan Curtis (of Dark Shadows fame) and acclaimed fantasy writer Richard Matheson for a TV movie. Directed by TV and film veteran John Llewlyn Moxey, The Night Stalker (1972) -- featuring newspaperman Kolchak trying to convince unbelieving Las Vegas authorities that they have a super-powered vampire in their midst -- generated the highest ratings ever for an original made-for-TV movie at the time. [Wikipedia] 

Naturally, another TV movie, The Night Strangler (1973) and the TV series followed in quick succession. “The Spanish Moss Murders,” the 9th episode of the series, follows the Kolchak formula to a T.

In classic Night Stalker fashion, the episode opens with Kolchak, looking like he’s been dragged through a mud bath, sitting in a hospital emergency room, narrating recent events into his omnipresent tape recorder.

As always, there are mysterious killings involving unwary victims wandering the streets at night and paying with their lives. The first victim, a young grad student and sleep research lab assistant is accosted on a dark street and crushed to death (make a note of her occupation -- it will be relevant later). The police brush it off as the aftermath of a hit-and-run accident, but Kolchak is skeptical.

It's never a good idea to go wandering the streets at night in a Night Stalker episode.

Which brings us to the puzzling clues that only Kolchak, with his reporter’s sixth sense, recognizes as crucial to the mystery -- in this case, small pieces of vegetable matter that inexplicably show up on each of the victims’ bodies. Relying on shoe leather in an age before Google, Kolchak finds out from a local botanical expert that the stuff is Spanish moss, not exactly common in the northern climes of Chicago.

But the real lifeblood of the series was the intrepid, relentless reporter going up against bumbling, dissembling authority figures, deflating their pretentions with his pointed questions and driving them to distraction with his “What, me? What did I do?” disingenuousness.

Kolchak came into his own during the Watergate revelations and the subsequent collapse of public trust in government. He was a rumpled, one man Watergate committee, making endless runs around authorities sputtering that there was “nothing to see here,” and seeing things -- especially paranormal things -- with a special clarity. (It’s perhaps no coincidence that another rumpled everyman from the era, Columbo, gained huge popularity matching wits with arrogant elites.)

“The Spanish Moss Murders” presents not one but three sputtering, clueless authority figures for Kolchak to run rings around. Police Captain Joe “Mad Dog” Siska (Keenan Wynn), investigating the second strange death involving Spanish moss, is not quite mad, but he’s teetering on the edge, and Kolchak nosing around is not helping matters. He’s so stressed out, that he admits to Kolchak in an unguarded moment that he’s in group therapy. (This was the first of two appearances Wynn would make on the show.)

Capt. Joe "Mad Dog" Siska is driven mad by Kolchak's relentless prodding.

Medical science comes in for a roasting when Kolchak makes the connection between the first victim and a sleep research laboratory that is conducting some sketchy experiments with a subject who has been put in an extended period of REM sleep. (Yes, the victims all have something in common besides Spanish moss, and it all traces back to the sleep lab, but I’ll leave it there.)

The lab director, Dr. Pollack (Severn Darden) is so wrapped up in his research that he seems blithely unconcerned about the health of his prize sleep subject, and he has to be reminded by a colleague of the name of the recently deceased grad assistant who was working for him.

Darden, who made a career out of playing effete doctors, professors and assorted politicians (and was in two Planet of the Apes movies, Conquest of and Battle for), amps up the pompous condescension as his character wearily lectures Kolchak on his all-important research.

(In an amusing epilogue, after all the dust has settled on the murderous events that Dr. Pollack unwittingly set in motion, Kolchak relates that the good doctor “had lost his taste for pure research. He’d shaved off his beard and gone back to Long Island to work in the family shoe business.”)

"To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the opportunity for lots of grant money..."

And then there’s Kolchak’s boss at the news service, Tony Vincenzo. Simon Oakland’s character spent most of the series screwing up his face and blustering at Kolchak as if every interaction with the reporter was the equivalent of a root canal. And yet, Kolchak always returned the next week with his job intact, so there had to be some grudging respect there.

In “The Spanish Moss Murders” we see a somewhat more relaxed boss, determined this time around to be clueless as to Kolchak’s latest crusade (presumably for his mental health). Instead, Vincenzo is fixated on a speech that he will be giving to a civic organization on freedom of the press, to the point that he corrals everyone in the office to drop what they’re doing and listen to him rehearse. In an amusing bit of business, Kolchak distractedly butters up Vincenzo while maneuvering around the office, trying to figure out how to steal away without being noticed.

Tony Vincenzo wears his signature skeptical frown along with a natty tie and vest.

If the lifeblood of the series was Kolchak’s defiance of authority, then the heart that kept it all pumping was the monster of the week. Kolchak: The Night Stalker was a delectable (detestable?) smorgasbord of night creatures, some familiar, like werewolves and vampires, some more obscure.

The obscure monster in "The Spanish Moss Murders" is the Père Malfait (roughly translated as “father of mischief”), popularly known as the Cajun Boogeyman. According to an article on "Louisiana Cajun Folklore" at The Moonlit Road website, the myth of the Père Malfait was imported to Louisiana Cajun country from France, where generations of parents used it to keep their children in line. A cross between Swamp Thing of comic book fame and Bigfoot, the Cajun Boogeyman crushes its victims to death before mysteriously vanishing, leaving only fragments of moss and leaves behind. Like the cinematic vampire, it can only be killed by driving a stake made from the swamp gum tree through its heart.

7’2” Richard Kiel, who made a career out of portraying imposing villains and creatures (and was most famously known for his Jaws character from the James Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker), was enlisted to step into the Père Malfait suit. Interestingly, he had just been seen the week before as the “Diablero” in episode 8 of the series, “Bad Medicine.” [IMDb]

The Père Malfait prefers the Louisiana bayous, but in a pinch Chicago's sewers will do.

Besides the plethora of monsters, another endearing feature of the series was that for all the effort the intrepid reporter put in exposing and thwarting the various paranormal perils, at the end of each week the evidence would conveniently disappear, and Kolchak would be left with nothing but his verbal notes on his trusty tape recorder. True to both series form and myth, after Kolchak’s encounter with the Père Malfait in Chicago’s dank sewer system, all traces of the creature disappear down the drains.

So, how exactly did a folkloric monster from Louisiana bayou country end up in Chicago’s sewers? You’ll have to watch the episode to find out!

Kolchak and his trusty tape recorder live to fight another day.

Where to find it: DVD | Streaming 

UFO Storage Wars: Hangar 18

Now Playing: Hangar 18 (1980)

Pros: Leverages UFO and government conspiracy lore to concoct a reasonably decent sci-fi thriller; Notable performances by Robert Vaughn and Darren McGavin
Cons: Has the look and feel of a TV movie; Woefully inept alien spacecraft exterior

There’s been a lot of interesting news on the UFO/UAP front since we last checked in on UFO cinema here at Films From Beyond. 

Following up the release of eye-opening footage of U.S. military encounters with UFOs, an honest-to-goodness government whistleblower, former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch, has testified before Congress that the federal government maintains a secret alien craft recovery program, and that we’re in possession of the remains of crashed vehicles and the bodies of non-human occupants.

To make things even more interesting, at least one element of the federal bureaucracy, The Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General, found Grusch’s complaints credible, which paved the way for his going public.

The mainstream media’s general disinterest in this astounding story, and the various attempts to impugn Grusch’s character, makes me think there is really something there.

Of course, ever since the incident in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, tales of crashed spaceships and recovered alien pilots have occupied the outer edges of UFO lore and challenged investigators to come up with hard evidence.

Okay, so this isn't real, but the Truth, and real preserved alien bodies, are out there... maybe.

Some researchers, citing reports from military personnel involved in the incident, maintain that pieces of the Roswell spacecraft, along with the bodies of its occupants, were transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton Ohio, where they allegedly ended up in a top secret location, Hangar 18.

Not long after Steven Spielberg turned UFOs into box office gold with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the people at Sunn Classic Pictures decided to hop aboard the interstellar gravy train with a UFO epic of their own.

Sunn Classic, known at the time for cheesy Biblical and paranormal documentaries (more on that later), wisely leveraged Hangar 18’s notoriety for their film, but instead of making another documentary, they went the dramatic route, relocating the infamous hangar to a remote Air Force Base in Texas.

Hangar 18 tries to set up a documentary feel with an opening title card, but what follows is pure B drama (don't get me wrong, that's not a bad thing).

The film opens with a space shuttle mission that is preparing to launch a satellite out of the cargo bay. One astronaut is in the bay attending to last minute details, while two others, Bancroft (Gary Collins) and Price (James Hampton) are driving the spacecraft.

Right before the launch, instruments show a large, mysterious craft taking up station next to the space shuttle, and Bancroft confirms with Mission Control that they can see the strange object.

The satellite’s engines fire, sending it straight into the UFO, resulting in an enormous explosion that **GULP!** decapitates the astronaut doing the EVA. The surviving astronauts execute an emergency re-entry while Mission Control tries to figure out what happened.

In space, no one can hear you lose your head.

Mission Control tracks the mystery object, which hasn’t been destroyed in the explosion and appears to be under intelligent control, to a landing site in the Arizona desert. The Air Force sends in a team to secure the area and whisk the craft to Hangar 18, which in Sunn Classic’s universe is located on a base in the middle of Nowhere, Texas.

At this point the film alternates between two plot lines. One features a conspiracy by Washington higher-ups to blame Bancroft and Price for the satellite disaster, while the astronauts in turn try to track down the recovered alien craft in order to clear their names. The other plot line dives into the minutia of ancient astronaut theories as a team of NASA experts examines the intact craft stored in the hangar.

The first storyline seems to have been inspired by Capricorn One (1977), in which an unscrupulous NASA administrator, fearing a budget-crippling mission failure, fakes a Mars landing for public consumption, but then must deal with the astronauts who, fearing for their lives, threaten to spill the beans.

Robert Vaughn plays Gordon Cain, an assistant to the President of the United States, who, in collaboration with the Air Force, is trying to cover up the existence of the recovered UFO. The President is a known UFO skeptic, and Cain figures that if word got out, somehow his boss’ re-election chances would be damaged (as if the government had no other reason to keep something like that secret).

In the '70s, Napoleon Solo quit the spy game and got a Washington, D.C. desk job.

The Capricorn One vibe is strong in scenes where Bancroft and Price discover unaltered NASA telemetry data showing the presence of the UFO during the mission, and are shadowed by federal agents in black suits (Men in Black?) as they check out the Arizona crash site. As the astronauts get closer to discovering the recovered spacecraft’s location, the stakes get higher and they realize the fight is not only for the Truth, but for their very lives.

CAUTION: CAN YOU HANDLE THE SECRETS OF HANGAR 18?

Erich von Däniken and his best-selling book Chariots of the Gods? hover over the parallel storyline of the examination of the captured alien craft. NASA administrator Harry Forbes (Darren McGavin), is tasked by the Air Force to assemble a crack team to investigate the alien technology.

Unaware of the trouble Bancroft and Price are in, Forbes hops to it. The scene in which the scientists first set eyes on the craft is clearly meant to evoke a Close Encounters-type sense of awe and wonder, but unfortunately Hangar 18 only evokes wonderment that the filmmakers thought they could get away with such an uninspired design.

As Forbes and a couple of scientists in hazmat suits approach the thing, it looks like nothing more than a large, industrial grade HVAC unit with flashing lights at the base. Considering the force of the explosion that tore the satellite apart and took out the unlucky spacewalking astronaut, there is hardly a scratch on the alien furnace, er, spacecraft.

"Gentlemen, behold the Sunn Classic 3000, the most powerful heating and air conditioning unit in the galaxy!"

Fortunately for the team the thing opens up on its own, and they’re able to marvel at advanced alien heating and cooling, er, space technology. I won’t get into too many spoilers, except to say that at least the craft’s interior and instruments are better conceived and are a couple of grades above the usual low-budget spaceship that looks like it was outfitted by Radio Shack.

Also, the team’s linguist, Neal Kelso (Andrew Bloch) is able to decode the alien language incredibly quickly, and his discoveries are pretty much a laundry list of von Däniken’s ancient astronaut theories.

Coming at the end of the turbulent ‘70s, Hangar 18 is an encapsulation of the post-Vietnam/Watergate distrust of government and the surge of interest in UFOs, the paranormal and assorted alternate “realities.”

The company behind Hangar 18, Sunn Classic Pictures, had already established a reputation for sensationalistic documentaries such as The Mysterious Monsters (1975; a survey of a whole range of paranormal creatures and topics), The Outer Space Connection (1975; more ancient astronauts), In Search of Noah's Ark (1976), and The Bermuda Triangle (1979).

During that period, Sunn Classic interspersed the documentaries with family-friendly, rural-oriented dramas like The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1974) and The Adventures of Frontier Fremont (1976), but after the company was bought by Taft Enterprises in 1980, the theatrical output turned almost exclusively to sci-fi and horror, with such notable releases as The Boogens (1981), Cujo (1983) and The Running Man (1987) following on the heels of Hangar 18.

Hangar 18 is the ultimate Sunn Classic picture, combining Watergate-style conspiracies, Roswell rumors, alien autopsies and speculation about ancient alien visitations into one dramatic package (although how well the parts fit together is open to debate).

Marveling at the alien viewscreen's crispness and clarity, Phil suddenly realized he would need to upgrade his TV before the Big Game.

The film’s ending is abrupt and violent, yet a radio broadcast voice over as the end credits roll strikes a note of cautious optimism. Hangar 18 seems like a pop culture bridge between the pessimism and cynicism of the ‘70s and Reagan’s Morning in America which was just dawning (and which itself turned out to be as phony as a Sunn Classic documentary, but that’s a discussion for another time).

Speaking of ‘70s signifiers, Hangar 18’s acting leads exemplify the decade as well as anyone. In the ‘60s, Robert Vaughn vaulted to fame as the suave spy Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. After that stint, he shed the action star veneer for character roles, especially authority figures. Perusing his IMDb resume for just the '70s alone, he portrayed two U.S. presidents along with a multitude of senators, military officers and corporate executives, many of them corrupt like his character in Hangar 18.

On the flip side, one of the highlights of Darren McGavin’s career came in the early to mid-’70s with his portrayal of bedraggled newshound Carl Kolchak in two Night Stalker TV movies and a short-lived series. Kolchak was the paranormal world’s answer to Woodward and Bernstein, constantly fighting to unearth stories of strange creatures and supernatural forces that the authorities preferred to keep under wraps (the X-Files’ Mulder and Scully would take up the cause in the ‘90s). Unlike Vaughn, who had a facility for portraying human snakes, McGavin was naturally cheerful and gregarious, so he was almost always cast as a reliable, if somewhat put upon, good guy.

Harry Forbes (Darren McGavin, right) channels the inquisitive spirit of Carl Kolchak in Hangar 18.

Astronauts Bancroft and Price were played by two solid character actors, both of whose career heydays were in the ‘70s. Gary Collins guested on some of the decade’s most iconic TV shows, including Hawaii 5-0, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, The Love Boat and Charlie’s Angels (he also starred as a paranormal investigator in the short-lived series The Sixth Sense).

Similarly, James Hampton was all over TV and low-budget movies, but scored a couple of memorable supporting roles in two big hits, The Longest Yard (1974, with Burt Reynolds) and The China Syndrome (1979, with Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon).

Hangar 18 tries valiantly to be a taut sci-fi thriller, but the effort is hampered by TV movie-grade chase scenes, the prosaic-looking alien craft, and some dull stretches. 

Bancroft and Price take a breather between encounters with Men in Black.

Vaughn and McGavin give it their all playing the impassioned bureaucrats (is that an oxymoron?). They each have their moments, but too much dialog and too many close-ups of furrowed brows slows down the middle part of the movie considerably. 

Perhaps the most fun to be had with Hangar 18 is counting the various homages and references to UFO lore. Additionally, it’s a great artifact of late-'70s paranoia (some would say sober realism). Maybe that’s enough to recommend it.

Where to find it: DVD | Streaming