A drunken, drug-taking, penniless Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) spends the last week of his brief life staggering around a gloomy Baltimore in 1849 pursued by a ludic copycat serial killer, who recreates gory scenes from Poe's morbid stories, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Pit and the Pendulum" among them. It's a moderately entertaining thriller that (contrary to the claims of its writers and director) throws little light on Poe's character and none on the mystery surrounding his death. The chief influence clearly comes from Douglas Hickox's classic thriller Theatre of Blood (1973), in which the cinema's supreme exponent of Poe, Vincent Price, plays a sadistic old actor exacting revenge on the London theatre critics' circle by dispatching them one by one in gory death scenes from Shakespeare.