Word: chiller
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Johnson is chiller than a month of Sunday mornings, so it's not surprising that his debut album, Brushfire Fairytales, is doing a slow but steady sales burn in Southern California, Hawaii and other places where sand abounds. With a supersoft vocal style and influences ranging from Jimmy Buffett and Cat Stevens to Ben Harper and De La Soul, Johnson has perfected the admittedly picayune art of contemporary beach music. If the rest of the country hasn't yet heard of him, it is likely because he could barely muster the ambition to get a recording contract in the first...
...Came From Beneath the Sea" also introduced me to two important actors in my Chiller Theatre Pantheon: Faith Domergue, Howard Hughes protégée and highlight of the classy "This Island Earth" (so tediously lampooned on "Mystery Science Theatre 2000") and Kenneth Tobey, a guy who personified an easygoing, Howard Hawks kind of professionalism in numerous sci-fi flicks, from "The Thing From Another World" to "Gremlins." I don't think there's a star on the Walk of Fame for Kenneth Tobey, but any fan of the genre knows just whom I'm talking about...
...Mikels has never harped on the connection between the two (first spotted by cult-movie fanatics); in fact, he goes so far as to downplay it in interviews. When I spoke to him at the Chiller Theatre convention in the late 1990s, he amiably stated that "I never once thought of pursuing litigation... I can sit down and dream up new stories like that.... As fast as my fingers can snap, I can give you a premise for a new story just like it. There are a lot of people who have ideas - maybe it just so happened that...
...Warner Bros. set in Los Angeles isn't a NORAD bunker. But the similarity is no accident. When executive producer George Clooney and crew re-create Sidney Lumet's 1964 nuclear chiller Fail-Safe, with CBS execs and director Stephen Frears (High Fidelity, Dangerous Liaisons) watching nervously from a trailer outside, they'll be facing another cold war-era specter: live television. Airing at 9 p.m. E.T. (delayed P.T.), this pet project of Clooney, a longtime lover of live TV whose father Nick was a newsman and variety-show host, will be CBS's first theatrical production in 39 years...
Aside or apart from the electronic buzz, Riding the Bullet is a better than average King chiller. The narrator, Alan Parker, looks back at the phone call he received while a student at the University of Maine, telling him his mother had been hospitalized with a stroke. Since his car is on the fritz, Alan must hitchhike the 120 miles from Orono to Lewiston to see her, and some awfully spooky things happen to him along the way, including getting a lift from a dead man. (Incidentally, this is King's first work since he was struck...