Events

As part of its weekend matinee series, the North Park will be showing Matinee, the 1993 comedy that deserves to acquire a cult following. Here’s a review of it I wrote for the Buffalo News back in the day:

Roger Corman alumnus Joe Dante made a career out of revisiting his favorite movie memories with semi-parodies like Gremlins, The Howling, Amazon Women on the Moon and Piranha. In Matinee, he recalls the craft of movie promotion and exhibition in those halcyon days when going to the movies was an event you looked forward to all week.

Set in Key West during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Matinee stars John Goodman as independent movie producer Lawrence Woolsey.  Woolsey’s movies are short on budget but long on gimmicks, and he’s visiting Key West to test screen his new movie Mant (“Half man, half ant, all terror!”).  The country may be poised on the brink of nuclear war, but as Woolsey puts it, “What better time to open a horror movie?”

Along to help are girlfriend Cathy Moriarty and assistants Dick Miller and John Sayles, who drum up business by protesting the movie under the guise of “Citizens for Decent Entertainment.” (As every Catholic schoolkid of the time could tell you, nothing made you want to see a movie more than being told it was bad for you.)

Woolsey is loosely based on William Castle, the poor man’s Alfred Hitchcock, remembered less for his second-rate suspense movies than for his promotional gimmicks. The most famous was The Tingler, for which he attached motors to random theater seats in order to buzz viewers during a scene in which the on-screen menace has escaped into a movie theater.

The funniest parts of Matinee are the scenes from Mant, a combination of The Fly, Them!, The Blob and a few dozen others. As cheesy as it is, it’s a sight better than anything ever made by the real Castle, who never would have invested in anything so elaborate as a rubber ant mask.

Unfortunately, most of the movie is spent in coming-of-age stuff involving a quartet of fifteen-year-olds. It’s necessary for context, but the balance is off — there should have been less of the kids and more Goodman (whose greatest quality as an actor is that he’s an overgrown kid.)

As in any Dante movie, the period details are great: kids listen to a forbidden Lenny Bruce record, a juvenile delinquent spouts bad Beat poetry, the theater marquee displays a “Fight Pay TV” banner. There’s a hilarious parody of a Disney movie called The Mixed-Up Shopping Cart. 

The script even manages to work in every baby-boom male’s sickest erotic fantasy, the one in which you and that unattainable woman are the only two survivors of nuclear Armageddon, thus forcing you to have sex in order to propagate the species.  And for good measure, there’s an unexpected dream scene that will give a palpable chill to anyone who grew up with The Bomb.