Dark Intruder (1965)

Dark Intruder (1965)

aka

Black Cloak

Long before he became an immortal slapstick icon with his role as Frank Drebin in "The Naked Gun" (and became typecast as such until his death), Leslie Nielsen actually was a pretty versatile actor and appeared in numerous cult movies. He starred in the classic fifties Sci-Fi movie "Forbidden Planet" and in the schlocky seventies eco-horror flick "Day of the Animals", for example. Very few people know, however, that Leslie was also the star of this unsold and meanwhile long forgotten pilot episode of a supernaturally themed period series entitled "The Dark Cloak". The pilot film – with an extremely short running time of barely 59 minutes – takes place in the year 1891 in the moody and fog-enshrouded streets of San Francisco. Nielsen is Brett Kingsford, a rather eccentric private investigator specialized the occult. He has a midget butler named Nikolai and doesn't want the world to know that he collaborates with the police, so he disguises whenever they meet to discuss a case. The city is plagued by a series of violent killings, seemingly committed by a monstrous being. Robert Vandenburg, a personal friend of Kingsford who's about to be married, fears that he commits the murders in a sort of trance, but our paranormal investigator suspects there is another explanation. (IMDB Coventry)

Leslie Nielsen - Vaughn Taylor

Werner Klemperer