Just a disclaimer, this B-movie action horror isn’t based around the real-life Night Stalker serial killer Richard Ramirez.
Instead what we get is a fantastically entertaining vehicle for genre specialists Charles Napier, who plays a grizzled cop who often wakes up in his skivvies and with bottles strewn across the floor.
Said cop J.J. is tasked with bringing down the titular Night Stalker who is targeting local prostitutes, with a whiff of voodoo on the periphery too.
Napier is a well known face in genre cinema, including a memorable turn in The Silence of the Lambs, as one of the cops who is gutted and hung from the cell during Hannibal Lecter’s escape.
What either hasn’t taken into account is the one-man scene stealer Julius (Julian Christopher), the local foul-mouthed pimp who has plenty to say to his ladies about missing work and the man who is striking fear into their hearts. Every time Christopher is on screen he is truly magnetic and hilarious, and its sad he doesn’t make it to the finale.
The Night Stalker is most well known for being the film that Bill Lustig saw when looking for his Maniac Cop, and saw the imposing Robert Z’Dar; and the rest they say is history. While his killer Chuck Sommers is largely on the periphery to begin with, he comes to the fore in an action-packed finale.
He also delivers one of the most OTT deaths in recent memory for this reviewer as he strangles J.J’s partner before throwing him out of a 2 storey window; you know just to make sure.
At a brisk 91 minutes, there is little filler here and The Night Stalker perfectly captures that trashy NYC street-level vibe that Lustig had been perfecting with films such as Vigilante and Maniac and continuing this soon after with his Maniac Cop films.
In conclusion, this is action-packed, violent and perhaps unintentionally funny and well worth seeking out. Now, where’s that blu ray revival for this B-movie goodness?
Watch The Night Stalker on YouTube –
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