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What has happened to America’s cheesy film industry? Where is the pride of our grade-z filmmakers? Does no one care anymore about making decent bad movies? You might imagine that crap impresario Tibor Takács -- who has such titles as NYC: Tornado Terror, Mega Snake, and, yes, Ice Spiders to his credit -- would know how to make a flick about space spiders genetically engineered by former Soviet eggheads and now out of control in the New York City subway filmed entirely on a Bulgarian backlot with mannequin-like actors mean something. But he can’t even be bothered to ladle on a preposterous theme about the balkanization of mad science in the wake of the breakup of the Ussr, or weave in a laughable motif about cultural environmental anxieties over global warming and overpopulated humanity encroaching on the natural world. My God, man, (said the frustrated critic and lover...

Screenwriter and producer T.S. Cook, best known for penning the 1979 thriller The China Syndrome died Saturday after battling cancer. He was 65. Cook, a Cleveland, Ohio native, received Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Best Screenplay for The China Syndrome, an honor he shared with co-writers Mike Gray and James Bridges. Cook was a decades-long active member of the Writers Guild of America and a “tenacious advocate” for writers, his longtime manager Jeff Aghassi tells Deadline. Cook was honored by the WGA in 1980 for The China Syndrome. He also received an Emmy nomination for penning The Tuskegee Airmen (1995) and won a second Writers Guild award for Nightbreaker in 1989. His other TV credits include Project U.F.O., Baretta, The Paper Chase, Airwolf, Texas Justice and most recently The Hive and NYC: Tornado Terror, which both aired on Syfy in 2008.