Matinee dvd movie.|
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Features • PAL In Theaters : 29 January, 1993 |
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Matinee description Matinee offers one of the best matches of director and screenplay that you're ever likely to find. Raised on a steady diet of 1950s monster movies, Joe Dante later contributed to the genre with such films as Gremlins and Explorers, but it was Charlie Haas's script for Matinee that gave Dante a perfect platform for comedy, dramatic context, and nostalgic homage. Set in Florida during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the movie focuses on a schlock-movie promoter named Woolsey (inspired by real-life producer William Castle and played to perfection by John Goodman) who arrives in Key West with his latest Grade-Z extravaganza, Mant, about the raving half-man/half-ant product of "science run amuck." (This movie-within-a-movie is a perfect tribute by Dante, who cast B-movie stalwarts in the kind of roles they'd built careers on.) Balancing youthful exuberance with the ominous threat of nuclear attack, Dante finds his alter ego in Simon Fenton, who plays a 15-year-old captivated by Woolsey's cheesy showmanship. This affectionate devotion is matched by Dante, who captures the anxiety of the missile crisis even as Matinee delivers an abundance of humor. Director John Sayles and Dante-movie veteran Dick Miller have cameos as Woolsey's show-biz accomplices, and Cathy Moriarty is brilliant as Woolsey's wisecracking mistress and Z-movie queen. All of this makes Matinee a polished gem that's sweetly entertaining while staying true to the serious context of its story. It's the movie Joe Dante was born to direct. --Jeff Shannon |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | A great tribute to 50's era horror films and panic in the streets |
| I felt that the advertising for this movie was somewhat misleading. I expected to see a film about John Goodman portraying a loose characterization of showman William Castle. Instead, the main focus of the film is a young boy, Gene Loomis, whose father is a soldier who is dispatched to active duty during the Cuban missile crisis, which is the time period in which this film is set. You have your typical coming-of-age themes revolving around Gene and his friends as they discover their own emerging adolescence, and this consists largely of tired material that has been done to death. However, I did like the scene where the character Sandra refuses to get down on the floor and put her hands behind her head during a civil defense drill, saying that "duck and cover" was useless. I actually remember doing these drills in elementary school back in the 60's.
Somewhat in the background we have John Goodman as old-fashioned showman Lawrence Woolsey, a vaudevillian stuck in the age of cinema who wants to put the show back in picture shows. He is tied into the film because Gene enjoys Woolsey's showmanship as a way to forget about the world around him which seems to be on the brink of self-destruction. Woolsey pulls such stunts as having his girlfriend (Cathy Moriarty) dress a a nurse and ask patrons to sign a waiver releasing Goodman's character from liability in case they die of fright during the movie. This is based on a similar stunt by William Castle and his movie "Macabre". Woolsey also wires the seats to produce a mild electric shock during a key moment in a film, which he labels "Atomo-Vision." That antic is based on what William Castle did during the showing of "The Tingler". Then he rigs still another device to shake things up as buildings on the screen are tumbling and calls it "Rumble-Rama." Again, these are all very similar to the showman-like stunts of William Castle during the 50's and 60's. The best part of the movie is when Woolsey comes up with an atomic-age monster movie entitled "Mant" that is a composite of cheesy 50's horror films such as "The Fly," and "Them!". "Mant" is about a mutant that is half-man and half-ant and is a total riot. Woolsey's schlock merchant displays just the right mix of con-man materialism and childlike glee at his own bogus movie magic. It's too bad that Goodman's character and his showmanship weren't the main focus of the movie - Goodman was truly born to play the part of Lawrence Woolsey. Perhaps the biggest joke of all is realizing that this movie cost about 100 times the budget of any of the old pictures being parodied. Besides recognizing all of the silly rituals such as the civil defense drills that people have performed and always will perform in order to feel like they have some control in an uncontrollable situation - remember the run on duct tape and plastic sheeting four years ago? - this movie really made me wish that there was a William Castle collection on DVD. Some of Castle's films were not so bad, and some were so bad they were good - "Macabre" comes to mind - but all of them were memorable. But none of them outside of "House on Haunted Hill" and "The Tingler", both starring Vincent Price, are ever on TV anymore. |
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