This is one of my all-time favorite movies. It had a great plot, good characters ... a reluctant hero and one of the best TV movie villains ever. Of course, you have to have a good villain to make a story work and Janos Skorzeny certainly fits the bill. And Barry Atwater plays Skorzeny with the perfect amount of venom and snarl, not going way over the top, which would have been easy to do.
Darren McGavin as Carl Kolchak was also a role he was born to play. The rumpled suit, the trademark straw hat (which he incidentally wore along with a tuxedo to a Dean Martin celebrity roast!), the almost Columbo-like dogged questioning and pursuit. His "High Noon" showdown with Skorzeny was as good as it gets .... no one else was willing or able to take down the bad guy so the character least likely to do it reluctantly decides to save the city from a maniac.
The characters who worked for Las Vegas law enforcement were more interested in protecting their backsides and practicing CYA after being made to look foolish and incompetent by a reporter willing to consider something beyond their imagination. By sending the only people who knew the truth - Kolchak, his girlfriend and his editor, Tony Vincenzo - either out of town or threatening them into silence, the cover-up of the truth was completed.
Persistent rumors exist that there are plans to remake this into a big screen movie .... I hope not, I am having problems imagining contemporary actors who could play these roles better than the original cast.
