John Goodman is ideally cast as B-movie fright king Lawrence Woolsey, a character inspired by William Castle, who lured audiences to his black-and-white cheapies in the Fifties and Sixties with gimmicks that included wiring seats for shocks. Director Joe Dante (Gremlins) captures that irreplaceable tackiness in Woolsey's half-man, half-ant film, MANT. Cathy Moriarty also catches the spirit as Woolsey's tootsie, Ruth, who doubles as the bombshell in distress in his cheese-ball epics.

But Charlie Haas's script inexplicably buries this beguiling parody in a dull story about four teenagers discovering sex in Key West, Florida, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. Woolsey figures it's an ideal time to open MANT in theater-rumbling Atomo-Vision. But even Atomo-Vision wouldn't rouse audiences after exposure to toxic teen twaddle that reduces a great idea to gray ash.

“I'm Yours”

Jason Mraz re-emerged after his disappointing second album with this lead single, a Jack Johnson-esque ditty about giving yourself fully to someone else. The success of the reggae-tinged song (it earned two Grammy nods and a spot on the Billboard singles chart for well over a year) was something the folk-pop singer never predicted when he wrote it in 15 minutes at home. "I played a happy-hippie chord progression that would probably work without 50 different Bob Marley songs," he told Rolling Stone. "I thought, 'It's too novelty. This is a nursery rhyme,'" concluding that "you can never guess what's gonna be a hit."