The longtime Hitch staple died today at the age of 73 while awaiting a lung transplant. He was 15 years off, and we’ve disabled the clock. Rest in peace, Bobby.

This just in: Singer Robert Goulet is currently hospitalized and awaiting a new lung. Not to irritate his wife further, but if he doesn’t pull through (we’re rooting for you, Bobby!), the 73-year-old crooner’s prediction of expiration will be off by a good 15 years.

Forty-three stories up, someone’s terrorizing a very dorky-acting Lauren Hutton in SOMEONE’S WATCHING ME!, a 1978 made-for-TV movie most notable for being written and directed by one John Carpenter, and shot merely weeks before he started filming a little indie thing called HALLOWEEN.

Fleeing to L.A. after a bad relationship, Hutton rents the apartment high atop the Arkham Tower, which directly faces another high-rise tower. It’s from there that an unknown man watches her every movie via telescope, leaves her presents, bugs her place, menaces her with phone calls, threatens her with notes and basically terrifies her to the point where there’s a huge gap between her teeth.

For help, she turns to lesbian workmate Adrienne Barbeau and professorial love interest David Birney, as well as the police, who can’t do anything about it until “he” does something. And believe it, that hellish moment eventually arrives.

With a dash of REAR WINDOW, the movie conjures up a fair amount of supsense on a low, low budget. But Carpenter finds effectiveness in efficiency, and even gets off a shot early in the film that’s one of the more frightening things in his oeuvre. As a Carpenter fan, I’ve wanted to see this “lost” film for years, and I wasn’t disappointed.

It’s now available on DVD, either separately or as part of Warner’s six-disc TWISTED TERROR COLLECTION, a boxed set of seemingly randomly chosen horror flicks like Oliver Stone’s THE HAND, EYES OF A STRANGER, Amicus’ FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE, Wes Craven’s DEADLY FRIEND and, um, DR. GIGGLES. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.