Matinee (1993 film)

''Matinee'' is a 1993 American comedy film directed by Joe Dante. It is about a William Castle-type independent filmmaker, with the American home front during the Cuban Missile Crisis as a backdrop. The film stars John Goodman, Cathy Moriarty, Simon Fenton, Omri Katz, Lisa Jakub, Robert Picardo, Kellie Martin, and Jesse White (in his final theatrical film role). It was written by Jerico Stone and Charles S. Haas, the latter portraying Mr. Elroy, a schoolteacher.

Plot

In October 1962, in Key West, Florida, Gene Loomis and his younger brother, Dennis, live on a military base with their mother Anne while their father is away on a United States Navy submarine. At a local movie theater one afternoon, Gene and Dennis see a promo for an exclusive engagement of producer Lawrence Woolsey's sensational new horror film, entitled ''Mant!'' Woolsey is scheduled to appear in-person at the theater the following Saturday. After the boys return home to the base, the Loomis family watches President Kennedy deliver a speech confirming the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Meanwhile, arriving in Florida with his actress girlfriend, Ruth Corday, Woolsey finds the fearful atmosphere created by the ongoing crisis as being perfect for hosting ''Mant!''s premiere.

Woolsey has brought along two of his actors, Herb Denning, a former hired thug, and Bob, a victim of the Hollywood blacklist now relegated to cheap, independent B movies They pose as outraged citizens protesting ''Mant!''s theatrical exhibition. However, local couple Jack and Rhonda strongly argue for allowing the premiere based on First Amendment rights. Later, at home, while reading an issue of ''Famous Monsters of Filmland'', Gene recognizes Herb as having starred in an earlier Woolsey film, ''The Brain Leeches''.

At school, Gene gradually befriends one of his classmates, Stan. He also becomes infatuated with Jack and Rhonda's daughter Sandra after she gets a week of detention for protesting against the uselessness of a " duck and cover" air raid drill. She tells the other students that it would be preferable to die from the immediate effects of an atom bomb instead of acute radiation syndrome caused by fallout. Stan has a crush on another girl at school, Sherry. However violent juvenile delinquent (and would-be poet) Harvey Starkweather, her ex-boyfriend, threatens Stan, so he lies to her out of fear, calling off their first date.

Woolsey continues to devote himself to promoting ''Mant!'', hiring Harvey to dress as the mutated half-man, half-ant creature from the film. He also installs buzzers in the theater seats as the first phase of a new film gimmick he is calling "Rumble-Rama". The cinema's manager, Howard, warns about Rumble-Rama's potential effects on the old and fragile balcony area, which can now only hold 100 people. At the Saturday matinee, Sherry encounters Stan, who is attending the premiere screening with Gene and Dennis. She is upset that he deceived her, but later reconciles with him when Gene intercedes on the couple's behalf. Sandra attends the premiere with her parents, but leaves them to watch the film with Gene. When Harvey (costumed as the ''Mant!'' monster) sees Sherry and Stan kissing during the film, he attacks Stan in a rage, then punches Woolsey after he tries to intervene, and a chase ensues. Stan takes a shotgun from a fallout shelter located in the theater's basement and uses it to frighten off Harvey. Sandra and Gene are locked inside the shelter by mistake when the door is accidentally closed and its time-lock activated. While trapped inside, the two comfort each other, eventually sharing their first kiss.

Woolsey helps rescue the pair from the shelter before their oxygen supply runs out. Harvey reappears and holds his switchblade to Ruth's throat, demanding the movie premiere's cash receipts from Woolsey. As he steals the cash, he kidnaps Sherry and escapes. Howard immediately calls the police, and Harvey is quickly arrested after crashing Woolsey's Cadillac outside the movie theater. Sherry and Stan happily reunite after this ordeal. Woolsey also realizes that Harvey has turned the "Rumble-Rama" machinery up so high that the now overcrowded theater balcony is starting to collapse from the heavy sound vibrations. Assisted by Gene, Woolsey projects trompe-l'œil footage of an atomic bomb mushroom cloud that appears to blast a hole through the screen and the theater's outside wall, quickly evacuating the now panicked audience to safety.

After the Cuban missile crisis has ended, Ruth and Woolsey leave for another premiere in Cleveland, bidding goodbye to Sandra and Gene. Woolsey has grown fond of the two kids, telling Ruth he might like to have two children after they marry. Sandra and Gene watch them drive away in Woolsey's new Cadillac. Navy helicopters fly over the beaches in Key West, implying that Gene's father will soon return home.

Cast

* John Goodman as Lawrence Woolsey
* Cathy Moriarty as Ruth Corday / Carole
* Simon Fenton as Gene Loomis
* Omri Katz as Stan
* Lisa Jakub as Sandra
* Kellie Martin as Sherry
* Jesse Lee as Dennis Loomis
* Lucinda Jenney as Anne Loomis
* James Villemaire as Harvey Starkweather
* Robert Picardo as Howard, the Theater Manager
* Jesse White as Mr. Spector
* Dick Miller as Herb Denning
* John Sayles as Bob
* David Clennon as Jack
* Lucy Butler as Rhonda
* Belinda Balaski as Stan's Mom
* Naomi Watts as Shopping Cart Starlet
* Kevin McCarthy as Gen. Ankrum (uncredited)

Production

Joe Dante says the financing of the film was difficult:

''Matinee'' got made through a fluke. The company that was paying for us went out of business and didn't have any money. Universal, which was the distributor, had put in a little money, and we went to them and begged them to buy into the whole movie, and to their everlasting sorrow they went ahead and did it. aughs./blockquote>

Principal photography began on April 13, 1992. Filming took place in and around the state of Florida, including the towns of Cocoa, Maitland, and Key West. The interior sequences in the school and the movie theater were filmed on set at Universal Studios Florida in Orlando. The street scenes were filmed in Oxnard, California. Production was completed on June 19, 1992.

Music

The original film score was composed by Jerry Goldsmith. Several cues from previous genre films were also used, arranged and conducted by Dick Jacobs. These included "Main Title" from '' Son of Dracula'' (1943); "Visitors" from '' It Came from Outer Space'' (1953); "Main Title" from ''Tarantula'' (1955); "Winged Death" from ''The Deadly Mantis'' (1957); two cues from '' This Island Earth'' (1955), "Main Title" and "Shooting Stars"; and three cues from the ''Creature from the Black Lagoon'' trilogy: "Monster Attack" from ''Creature from the Black Lagoon'' (1954); "Main Title" from ''Revenge of the Creature'' (1955); and "Stalking the Creature" from '' The Creature Walks Among Us'' (1956).

Casting

Joe Dante had cast character actor Dick Miller in each of his movies, casting him in ''Matinee'' as one of the men protesting the monster movie's release, and as a soldier holding a sack of sugar in ''Mant''. Also appearing in supporting roles are William Schallert and Robert O. Cornthwaite (who both appeared in scores of low-budget films of all genres); Kevin McCarthy (perhaps best remembered for his role in ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers'') as well as Robert Picardo, both of whom appeared in several of Dante's films. John Sayles, who collaborated with Dante on earlier films, appears as one of the men who is protesting the release of ''Mant''.

Films within the film

''Mant!''

Woolsey's low-budget ''Mant!'' is a parody morphing of several low-budget science fiction horror films of the 1950s (many in black and white) that fused radioactivity with mad science and mutation. These films include ''Tarantula'' (1955), wherein a scientist is injected with an atomic isotope formula with disastrous results, and the films '' Them!'' (1954); ''The Beast with a Million Eyes'' (1955) ''The Deadly Mantis'' (1957); '' The Black Scorpion'' (1957); ''The Amazing Colossal Man'' (1957); '' Monster That Challenged the World'' (1957); '' Beginning of the End'' (1957); ''War of the Colossal Beast'' (1958); '' The Fly'' (1958) and ''The Alligator People'' (1959). The depiction of ''Mant!''s use of Rumble-Rama is a riff on William Castle's many in-theatre gimmicks ( "Emergo", "Percepto", "Illusion-O", "Shock Sections" etc.), however, the only "monster movie" produced or directed by William Castle before 1970 was 1959's ''The Tingler'', which did not have a radiation theme. Rumble-Rama is also a nod to Sensurround, Universal's sound process of the 1970's. ''Matinee'' also mentions some of Woolsey's earlier horror movies: ''Island of the Flesh Eaters'', ''The Eyes of Doctor Diablo'', and ''The Brain Leeches'' (not to be confused with the real-world 1977 film of the same name).

''The Shook-Up Shopping Cart''

Although ''Matinee'' is set in October 1962, its other film within a film, the family-oriented gimmick comedy ''The Shook-Up Shopping Cart'' (featuring an anthropomorphic shopping cart), is a reference to some color Disney comedies that came later in the decade: ''The Love Bug'' (1969) in particular, and '' The Ugly Dachshund'' (1966); ''Monkeys, Go Home!'' (1967); ''Blackbeard's Ghost'' (1968); ''The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit'' (1968); ''The Million Dollar Duck'' (1971); ''Snowball Express'' (1972) and ''The Shaggy D.A.'' (1976) in general. The film features Naomi Watts.

Release

''Matinee'' was released on January 29, 1993 in 1,143 theatres. It ranked at #6 at the box office, grossing $3,601,015 in its opening weekend. The film went on to gross $9,532,895 in its theatrical run.

Reception

''Matinee'' was well received by film critics and has a 92% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes, based on 38 reviews with an average rating of 7.7/10. The website's critical consensus reads "Smart, funny, and disarmingly sweet, ''Matinee'' is a film that film buffs will love -- and might even convert some non-believers." Roger Ebert gave the film three and half out of four stars and wrote "There are a lot of big laughs in ''Matinee'', and not many moments when I didn't have a wide smile on my face". Gene Siskel gave the film three and half out of four stars and remarked that the "boring title...doesn't communicate the joy within this film". In her review for ''The New York Times'', Janet Maslin wrote "''Matinee'', which devotes a lot of energy to the minor artifacts of American pop culture circa 1962, is funny and ingenious up to a point. Eventually, it becomes much too cluttered, with an oversupply of minor characters and a labored bomb-and-horror-film parallel that necessitates bringing down the movie house". ''Entertainment Weekly'' gave the film a "B+" rating, and Owen Gleiberman wrote, "In ''Matinee'', Dante has captured the reason that Cold War trash like ''Mant'' struck such a nerve in American youth: The prospect of atomic disaster was so fanciful and abstract that it began to merge in people's imaginations with the very pop culture it had spawned. In effect, it all became one big movie. ''Matinee'' is a loving tribute to the schlock that fear created".

In his review for the ''Los Angeles Times'', Peter Rainer wrote of Dante's film: "He pulls out his bag of tricks and even puts in an animated doodle; he's reaching not only for the flagrant awfulness of movies like ''MANT'' but also for the zippy ardor of the classic Warner Bros. cartoons. He does everything but put a buzzer under your seat". In his review for the ''Chicago Reader'', Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote "At the same time that Dante has a field day brutally satirizing our desire to scare ourselves and others, he also re-creates early-60s clichés with a relish and a feeling for detail that come very close to love". In her review for ''The Washington Post'', Rita Kempley wrote "In this funny, philosophical salute to B-movies and the B-moguls who made them, Dante looks back fondly on growing up with the apocalypse always on your mind and atomic mutants lurking under your bed". In his review for the ''USA Today'', Mike Clark wrote "Part spoof, part nostalgia trip and part primer in exploitation-pic ballyhoo, ''Matinee'' is a sweetly resonant little movie-lovers' movie".

See also

* Cuban Missile Crisis
* List of films featuring fictional films

References

External links

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Joe Dante
interview at DVD Savant

{{Joe Dante

1993 films
American black-and-white films
American comedy films
American coming-of-age films
Films about the Cuban Missile Crisis
1990s English-language films
Films scored by Jerry Goldsmith
Films directed by Joe Dante
Films set in the 1960s
Films set in 1962
Films set in a movie theatre
Films set in Florida
Films shot in Florida
Universal Pictures films
Films about shapeshifting
1993 comedy films
1990s American films