Can you imagine what the elevator pitch for "The Zombie" might have been? "It's 'The Godfather' meets 'Live and Let Die'!" Even a network executive might have scratched his head over the latter, but viewers in 1974 would recall that the James Bond movie released the previous year drew heavily from both current blaxploitation pictures and from late-night "creature feature" screenings of zombie chestnuts such as "White Zombie" and "I Walked with a Zombie" that depicted Caribbean voodoo culture.
Combine those with the Mafioso saga of "The Godfather" and you have the second installment of "Kolchak: The Night Stalker," with intrepid reporter Carl Kolchak pursuing a supernatural horror--until it begins to pursue him in this snappy tale that ultimately wobbles at the finish but hardly does an injustice to its star, the always-delightful Darren McGavin.
Reflecting these elements, Zekial Marco conceived the story that he and David Chase scripted, which initially finds Kolchak back on the crime beat. (Chase would eventually achieve immortality as the creator of the groundbreaking television crime drama "The Sopranos.")
Someone is targeting the Syndicate's numbers racket, with a former boxer who took a dive getting rubbed out; then, when Kolchak's editor Tony Vincenzo dangles a juicy exclusive--with a catch--before him, he witnesses a police shootout at a Syndicate burial ground (in a suspiciously Southern California-looking part of rural Illinois) that kills two organized-crime brothers. Only all three victims were killed by having their spines snapped, and according to morgue attendant Gordie "the Ghoul" Spangler (John Fiedler), who runs his own numbers game, the police also recovered the hulking body of Francois Edmonds (former AFL defensive end Earl Faison, who, ironically, suffered from back problems during his football career), a black numbers runner whose body had already been brought into the morgue, and subsequently buried, the previous week.
Thus Kolchak is plunged into the world of back-breaking zombies ("Live and Let Die" voodoo) even as he gets caught in the middle of a brewing turf war between the Italian Syndicate ("The Godfather") led by Benjamin Sposato (Joseph Sirola) and African-American gangsters ("Live and Let Die" blaxploitation) led by Sweetstick Weldon (Antonio Fargas). The latter ultimately leads him to voodoo practitioner Mamalois Edmonds, who re-animated her grandson to wreak revenge on them that done him wrong as industry veteran Paulene Myers lights up the screen in the single best guest-star performance.
Then "The Zombie" sags as Kolchak must go do the voodoo that he do so timorously amidst too-dark nighttime location scenes in an automobile junkyard, with director Alexander Grasshoff having to slow his brisk pacing while even Gil Mellé's spicy Creole-flavored incidental music cannot resurrect the undead spots. Furthermore, the "catch" Vincenzo dangled before Kolchak was journalistic wannabe Monique Marmelstein, the plot-annoyance niece of an Independent News Service bigwig at New York headquarters played by Carol Ann Susi--and just wait until that strident voice crops up decades later in "The Big Bang Theory."
But redeeming the flaws are the sparkling scenes between McGavin and Simon Oakland, particularly a hilarious telephone conversation collision as Tony is trying to patch things up between Carl and Monique--and by extension her uncle-while a distracted Carl is carrying on with Gordie, with their contentious yet gruffly respectful interplay, a reporter-editor staple dating back at least to "The Front Page," one of the core strengths of "The Zombie," and by extension "Kolchak: The Night Stalker," which will surely rise again. (As will Marmelstein, unfortunately.)
