Walker Does Halloween

Since last we sampled Walker, Texas Ranger, it's become another series, along with McGyver and Magnum P.I. that nobody knows nor cares has been on air for ages as a modern reboot. But in the original, we learned that Chuck Norris really loves Jesus, so it seems like the last show to be hurling its audience into the pagan sin-pit of a Halloween special. However, Walker's moralistic world of conservative religion is surprisingly laissez-faire with supernatural elements, with various episodes about telekinetic boys, reincarnated Buddhist monks, and even UFOs. As one features an angel issuing direct orders from God to stop all gang violence, it was only a matter of time before my pal the Devil got involved.

The Children of Halloween came on the night of October 31st 1998; a true Halloween special. Even as early as the late nineties, Chuck's looking very face-lifty, with teeth like expensive crockery, and a beard which seems airbrushed. The cold open has him take down baddies in gorilla masks shooting up a pawn shop with Uzis, before a shot of a moon above a graveyard, at what a spooky font informs us is Halloween night. Down in a crypt, scared kids huddle in the corner as a black-robed figure with echo effects on his voice informs them “time to die!” A woman's gagged and tied to an altar, in a faun-coloured top I briefly confused for nudity on Walker, Texas Ranger.

Flash back to one week earlier, at Thunder Karate dojo; presumably where every person in town learned how to roundhouse; for a long montage of children kicking and blocking, clean-cut sensei nodding approvingly, to the applause of wholesome parents with their shirts tucked in. Not just trying to convert viewers to Christianity, Chuck's clearly evangelising for karate too, and if only everyone would get in their PJs and start breaking very thin bits of wood, all the world's problems could be over! Case in point, the transformation of young Joey; parents thanking sensei for encouraging the little tyke to keep his room clean. It'd be a real shame if Joey was kidnapped by a Satanic cult.

After celebratory pizza with his karate mates, Joey's lured by children's voices crying for help into an abandoned warehouse with a pentagram on the floor. One chloroform rag to the gob later, he's bundled into a red van. Our villain, believing himself to be the son of Satan, is literally named Lucifer, and Walker takes its definition of Satanism straight from the Satanic Panic; experts with occult knowledge gleaned from a single issue of Shiver and Shake. The baddies all have leather jackets, and a cop who's dealt with Satanists before confirms “they mutilate animals, vandalise graves, churches.”

The episode's interesting, because the theme of a Satanic cult kidnapping children – if not for one brave Consecutive in a cowboy hat – would become the mainstream conspiracy theory de jour 25 years later. I covered the Satanic Panic in a video both YouTube and Vimeo banned, and Walker's portrayal of Satanism is right in line with both those 80's 'experts' and modern QAnon. Lucifer's in a skull belt and lovely (if evilly-coloured) black sweater, with classic heathen wrong'un eye-liner, nail varnish and long hair. With a hot goth girlfriend accomplice in a netted top, he's living the (my) dream! As you'd expect with Walker, Wiki page of the actor portraying Lucifer, Erik Dellums, confirms he's since earned a regular spot on Fox News through his anti-Obama blog posts.

With Joey missing, Chuck corrals a posse of parents to search the town with torches, in one of many obvious day-for-night scenes, shot at lunchtime but tinted blue with the contrast way down. Chuck immediately wanders into the warehouse, finding Joey's gi on the floor and spotting the pentagram – “call the FBI.” Then more kids are lifted from their own front yards, leaving nothing behind but pentagrams daubed on fences and garage doors. A tiny subplot takes us to the Dallas Hope Centre (Help Our People Excel); a group home for troubled teens, where a girl named Melissa in a big 90's hat is caught by a grown-up just considering reaching into a wallet with notes poking out of it. She too, will end up getting snatched, along with the grown-up, who's the bound and gagged (but not nude) lady, thanks to these long-running episodic shows needing every little background-character-of-the-week to have their own tiny arc.

Seeking answers, Chuck visits a store whose sign is a cauldron with YE OLDE MAGICK SHOPPE on it, in a rough part of town where bikers in bandanas sit nearby astride their hogs. Inside is beautiful 'occult episode' set design, with plastic skulls, a beaded curtain, and a lava lamp (still boxed), while the sexy Wiccan shopkeep (Downdown Julie Brown) gets saucy sax as she descends a spiral stair. After Chuck (or rather, one of his egregiously obvious stunt doubles) roundhouses some “nutjob” customers – mohawked punks in leather jackets – Brown describes a certain Lucifer, who purchased a book titled Secret Satanic Rituals off her a few weeks ago. His address? 2727 Mockingbird Drive, which for all its Munsters spookiness, is a shithole in the middle of nowhere, walls plastered in black magic posters and graffiti reading COME DIE WITH ME, and booby-trapped with a bomb which sends Chuck and his deputy flying through the window. “Ooh, that was close,” says the deputy. “Too close,” replies Chuck. Reading aloud from his book, Chuck realises Lucifer's plan is a ritual of ascension, opening Hell with a blood sacrifice to his dad, the Devil, which is why he needs the kids. “Sacrifice must take place in a cemetery at exactly midnight on Halloween” – that's tonight! Note that Chuck's ranger badge is identical to the satanic symbol on the cover.

After a brief roundhouse-heavy stop-off to a biker strip bar called Hell's Belle's, where the sole dancer's in a bikini, Lucifer's tracked down to an “old farmhouse” ten miles outside of Denton, which is where the Von Erichs lived. After sacrificing a goat with a hearty “Hail Satan!” it's now end game at the cemetery, Lucifer ordering hooded disciples to “bring the children!” As he's about to plunge a knife right betwixt the lady's milkers, (someone dressed as) Chuck runs in with a flying kick. The graveyard goon-fight feels like your crush doing fire poi on the beach, with Satanic bad guys swinging flaming torches and getting wiped out by backhanders. Chuck straight-up pulls a gun on Lucifer, who claims he can't be killed, but it turns out even the Devil Jr isn't immune to the power of a roundhouse kick. In the process, he accidentally stabs himself, and as goth gf weeps, he dies against a tombstone, with flickery-flames editing and a sinister laugh suggesting he's gone to Hell. Back at the dojo, sensei whitebread introduces the class to newest student, Big Hat Melissa, and has Joey “take her to the back and work with her on the proper method of punching.” Meanwhile, Chuck's at a bar with Wiccan Lady, politely informing her the love spells didn't work. She calls him “handsome” and plants a kiss, no doubt sad he won't be roundhousing her right in the fanny.

One of Walker's most overtly supernatural hours came on November 4th 1995, a date which pegs Evil in the Night as a de-facto Halloween episode, and it's set the week-of, with pumpkin bunting set-design, and orange and black garlands hanging from the ceiling in Chuck's office; a spooky-season extravagance I certainly didn't expect from such a man of God. Cold open has a horse sent mad by a falcon that won't stop staring at it; Chuck watching from the porch as an ill-wind ruffles his lovely fudge-coloured mullet, as through judicious editing of head-bobs, the falcon appears to be hypnotising the horse. Chuck soothes the beast, then basically gets in a staring contest with a bird, and when it does an aggressive fly-past, Chuck has a quick vision of a Native American man's face.

Down at his feet, a black feather. Lightning strikes; a falcon passes the moon, above a taped-off hole in a building site, where teens in tie-dye dare each other to break in – “you're not gonna wimp out on me now?” We've all done it, haven't we? Mucked about in an Indian burial ground with actual skulls sticking out of the dirt, and pranking our mates with a skeletal hand, before a ghostly falcon transforms itself into a medicine man right before our eyes? Yes, Evil in the Night is notable for an early onscreen portrayal of a Skinwalker, played here by villain in a thousand B-Movies, Billy Drago. Drago teleports around the freaked-out hooligans before using a chant to raise Native American ghosts; proper translucent ones; even with a skeleton face like when they open the ark, for a whole four frames.

The boys' bodies are found the next morning, literally scared to death, with sole witness an elderly security guard who's talking a load of old willy about a fella with dead eyes and a load of ghosts. Ship him off to a home, the mad old duffer! But hold on; Chuck's not so quick to disbelieve, and spots another black feather stuck to the fence. A fat-cat councilman from city hall's pissed at Chuck for not solving the case, costing the city a fortune by holding up construction, in a scene featuring the amazing line “these rumours about killer ghosts already have the public worried, the press is gonna have a field day!”

The site foreman was found dead a fortnight ago, electrocuted in his bath after digging up the bones, and now the Skinwalker's scaring an architect to death in his own office! Coincidentally, Chuck and his deputy arrive just in time to hear his final screams. At least, that's how most shows would've done it; only finding the mysterious aftermath, leaving but a tantalising hint of evidence right before the credits, for a “ghosts aren't real... or are they?!” But this is Walker, and they open the door to catch ghosts flying round, dragging the architect through the air by his tie like the Scoleri Brothers. After shooting the tie and saving him, Chuck Norris's acting of seeing real proper ghosts try to kill a man registers on his face like he's just opened a fridge to see some milk in there. “What was that?” asks the deputy. “Bad medicine,” says Chuck, “real bad.”

Chuck's half-Cherokee in real life, which is often a plot point in the series, as it is here, visiting his mate White Eagle who senses “there is sorrow in your heart and worry in your eyes.” Imagine if he could convey some of that onscreen. Chuck shows him the black feather, which White Eagle confirms are from a witch who can turn into a raven. Despite this line, and the fact the dropped feathers are all jet black, the bird is very clearly a falcon. Was it written as a raven but they could only wrangle a falcon on the day of shooting? Why not change one word in the script? Warned he'll die against a Skinwalker, there's a montage of shirtless Chuck sat in a sweat lodge, with our man looking the most Canon-era Chuck Norris yet. Blessed by the tribe, White Eagle's words echo in his head like Obi Wan's when Luke's flying down the trench, as he almost crashes his truck swerving to avoid Billy Drago stood in the road.

Shit gets wilder, as the crooked councilman who covered it up gets accosted by Drago into jumping in front of a bus, while the architect's been found hung inside his locked house. In home-wear of bodybuilder shirt and stripey Zubaz, Chuck tells the deputy he's taking on the Skinwalker alone. “It's a tribal thing, white man's rules don't apply here.” The deputy is black, although Chuck says he dances like a white man before sending him on his way. Then we're into a dream sequence which puts him a white suit and dickie bow in a 1920's neon expressionistic set, marriage proposal to a sexy DA accompanied by a live violinist. Hope he doesn't lurch awake with “I've cummed the bed!” But Drago's outside in his garden, and then inside the dream, where Chuck strangles the DA, before ghosts start strangling him. White Eagle's advice pulls Chuck out of it, and he snaps awake, alone, and – as far as we know – in an un-cummed in bed.

The final confrontation contains no roundhouse kicks; instead an It-style psychological duel, where Chuck's forced to revisit painful flashbacks of previous episodes – a botched drug raid in Mexico where a deputy died; seeing a platoon member cark it in 'Nam, where he's sadly played by a younger actor, missing the opportunity to cut in footage from his mental action films, though he does dub the voice. Drago takes a female reporter hostage, and Chuck gets the Jaws zoom, in a – for the show – avant-garde series of quick cuts and discordant voices; wild zooms, funny angles and distorted lenses; Walker by Stan Brakhage. The Skinwalker surrounds Chuck with multiple doppelgängers of himself, which with the 1995 effects, gives something of a Limmy's Tina Turner sketch vibe.

But Chuck spots a bead of sweat coming from one Running Wolf (“illusions don't sweat”), pegs it as real, and throws a knife, getting him right in the heart, before bodyslamming him into the mass grave just to be sure. The tribe do a cleansing ritual, and the building site's cursed spirits dance off into the sky. This wouldn't be the last episode to use ghosts of dead Native Americans, with another helping Chuck solve its own murder the following year. There's an important lesson to be learned in these specials, and it's not about staying away from the dark side, rather, if a man who almost certainly hands out Gideon bibles to trick or treaters is knocking it out of the park like this, the rest of us really need to up our game.