Film and TV director and producer; Born August 2, 1929; Died October 26, 2007. BERNARD L Kowalski, who has died at the age of 78, made a contribution to cinema history that hardly ranks alongside that of Spielberg and Hitchcock. But no other film director has managed to demonstrate quite such a commanding ignorance of both zoology and geography.
Not content with misrepresenting leeches as huge, predatory man-eaters in the low-budget horror movie Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), Kowalski notoriously repositioned the volcanic island of Krakatoa on the wrong side of Java a decade later.
The business with leeches was a conscious decision: they are irksome creatures and the choice seems relatively sensible alongside that of some rival animal-monster movies. Attack of the Giant Leeches has acquired a minor cult following and is available in a DVD box set that also includes The Killer Shrews.
In The Incredibly Strange Film Book (1993), Jonathan Ross wrote: "The leeches are, of course, played by men in rubber suits, but sadly the suits don't quite cover the air tanks on their backs. By the end of this film's mercifully short 62 minutes, I found myself getting quite fond of them."
There should be a wonderful anecdote behind the title Krakatoa, East of Java, but it was a straightforward mistake. Someone got it into their head that it was east of Java, no-one checked and then hundreds of experts appeared.
The title is the most interesting thing about the movie, which was set around the eruption of 1883 and starred Maximilian Schell, Diane Baker and Sal Mineo.
Between his two most notorious films, Kowalski established himself as one of American television's top directors. He helped create Mission: Impossible (1966-73) and directed several early episodes.
He was born Bernard Louis Kowalski in Texas in 1929. His father was an assistant director and production manager, and Kowalski began working with him in his teens, graduating to director on TV westerns.
He was given a chance to work in movies by producer Roger Corman, for whom he made both Attack of the Giant Leeches and Night of the Blood Beast (1958).
Kowalski later directed several solid mainstream movies, including the thriller Stiletto (1969), the western Macho Callahan (1970) and SSSSnake (1973). On TV he worked on such series as The Untouchables (1962), Rawhide (1964-65), Gunsmoke (1966), Columbo (1971-76), The Streets of San Francisco (1972), The Rockford Files (1974), Knight Rider (1982-84) and Magnum PI (1983-87). It is an impressive body of work, but there is nothing there quite as original or distinctive as Attack of the Giant Leeches.
He is survived by his wife and four children.
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