Joe Dante's mockery of, hommage to, and commentary on, the gimmicky grade-Z fright films of his youth. Typically, he doesn't know where to stop, or even slow down. Atypically, he at least knows where to start. A William Castle-ish huckster from Hollywood (or off-Hollywood) arrives in Key West to test-screen his latest opus, Mant (half-man, half-ant: "So Terrifying," admonishes the Coming Attraction, "Only Screams Can Describe It"). Off the coast, meantime, the Cuban Missile Crisis heats up -- and so much the better! The embellishing details of a "duck-and-cover" drill at school and a bomb shelter beneath the theater are pertinent and illuminating, and the black-and-white film-within-the-film has its share of chuckles ("Human-insect mutation is far from an exact science," propounds the same actor who played the scientist in Hawks's The Thing, Robert Cornthwaite). Dick Miller shows up, as he always will in a Dante film, as a paid picket outside the theater, along with the slumming John Sayles, protesting the "cheap sick thrill for a bunch of hopheaded teenagers." John Goodman, Cathy Moriarty, Simon Fenton. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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