Literary journalism and celebrity are the subjects of this satirical nightmare fictionalising the last days of Edgar Allan Poe, who was found before his death in 1849 roaming the streets of Baltimore in a state of delirium; it is directed by James McTeigue and written by Hannah Shakespeare and Ben Livingston. John Cusack is wittily cast as the washed-up Poe. He is on the skids, always broke and hungover; the city's newspaper will no longer publish his literary reviews and the glory days of his celebrated macabre tales are a distant memory. Then a serial killer and No 1 Poe fan starts rampaging through the city, re-enacting the plots of classic stories such as The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Pit and the Pendulum, daring Poe to catch him and write a late masterpiece about it all. There's a bit of Saw and Se7en here, as well as Vincent Price in Theatre of Blood; Stephen King's Misery and Updike's Bech Noir spring to mind, and it's a nice touch to give Baltimore a serial killer over a century before Dr Hannibal Lecter was employed by the Johns Hopkins Medical Centre in that city. It runs out of steam in the final 10 minutes, but there's some gruesome drama and Cusack is on decent form.

• This review was amended on Friday 9 March 2012 because the original named a Vincent Price film as "House of Blood". In fact the film is called Theatre of Blood. This has been corrected.