Review: Matinee, Joe Dante's wacky tribute to monster movies
Matinee is a little-seen, charming comedy that's both a love letter to old-school movie theatres and schlocky, exploitative monster movies from the 50s. It’s set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, dealing with nuclear paranoia and the fear of the apocalypse. Messy, uneven and quite weird at times, the film is pure Joe Dante (Gremlins, Small Soldiers), who has always managed to imprint his very own style in everything he has directed. It may not always work —especially in Matinee— but it’s never boring.
John Goodman plays Lawrence Woolsey, a William Castle/Albert Hitchcock type who delights in scaring audiences with his monster movies. His latest ones have been all flops, though, so he decides to take his girlfriend/main actress, Ruth Corday (Cathy Moriarty) to Key West, Florida and reveal his latest and greatest production to the whole town: horror film Mant! (half-man, half-ant) in “Atomo-Vision” and “Rumble-Rama”.
Meanwhile, we have the group of kids who will obviously get involved in these shenanigans somehow. Monster movie fans/brothers Gene (Simon Fenton) and Dennis Loomis (Jesse Lee Soffer), who live on a military base, waiting on their father, who is stationed on a nearby submarine; Stan (Omri Katz), who becomes infatuated with popular girl Sherry (Kellie Martin), Sandra (Lisa Jakub), a girl who doesn’t believe in their school’s safety measures in case an atomic bomb gets dropped, and Harvey Starkweather (James Villemaire), a prison poet who used to date Sherry and apparently taught her all about “her body and her desires”.
Matinee is very clearly divided into two parts. The first is the set up and the audiences’ introduction to all the characters and their personal “dramas” (let’s use that word lightly, since we’re talking about a goofy comedy here), while the second half is filled with hijinks and crazy antics, all taking place during the screening of Mant!.
The film’s first forty minutes or so are its weakest. Dante is clearly passionate about the film’s backstory, giving news reports and radio announcements about the Cuban Missile Crisis a lot of screen time. We also get to see the ridiculous way teachers tell their students to protect themselves from a possible attack, and a particular character’s paranoia toward Russia and the bomb. A couple of characters —liberal Sandra and predictable Shelly— embody the differences between socially acceptable behavior for women in the sixties, and a more rebellious and modern kind of conduct.
Interestingly enough, the film does a good job at portraying the way these stories actually connected with audiences at the time. One can enjoy a silly monster movie from time to time, but filmmakers in the 50s took advantage of the current political climate in order to introduce these creatures to movie audiences. Real life paranoia transformed into the fear of the unknown, of men turning into monsters; people resorted to fiction in order to let go of their fears and sort of “confirm” that their dread of the atomic bomb and the Russians was justified.
Matinee’s strengths don’t lie in its social commentary, though. This is first and foremost a comedy, and in that regard, it’s partly successful. The last half of the film is pretty riotous, presenting the screening as a circus-like, busy and noisy event. Woosley makes sure to utilize every trick under his sleeve in order to frighten his audience; he rigs seats with electric shockers, he makes sure the theatre trembles during certain parts of the movie, and even uses smoke and the presence of a guy in an ant suit in order to make the experience more “believable”. It’s all very chaotic and entertaining.
The movie is both an homage and a parody of the different techniques and “processes” studios used in order to attract more people to the movie theatre. Nowadays, we only get digital 3D —Peter Jackson’s experiment with 48 FPS projections probably doesn’t count, I think—, but back in the old days, some movies —especially monster movies or B-movies— were presented more like shows than as simple screenings. Going to the theatre was an event, and people liked feeling like they were getting all the bang for their buck. In this case, quite literally.
John Goodman is very good as Lawrence Woosley. He is, above all, a salesman, but one also gets the impression that he really gets a kick out of entertaining people and making them scream. (“They say this movie actually made some people throw up!”) It’s the kind of character that could've been played as cartoonish, over-the-top and larger-than-life, but thankfully Goodman does something a little more interesting. His Woosley is a tranquil sort of presence, a man who doesn’t lose his calm during dire situations, and who seems to care about the people who pay good money to see his shows. It’s a surprisingly human interpretation of a character who inhabits quite a wacky world.
Most of the kids are equally believable. Simon Fenton plays Gene as a geek and responsible kid; he cares about his little brother, but he also enjoys teasing him quite a bit. Omri Katz’s Stan is shy and a bit insecure, but charming nonetheless. Lisa Jakub plays Sandra as a loner, a more progressive kind of girl in a very backwards world —she even considers having kids with Stan to “repopulate the Earth” when she thinks an Atom Bomb has been dropped—, and Kellie Martin’s Sherry is the stereotypical, bubbly, attractive schoogirl, but with a twist: she’s more experienced than her peers in certain areas. Cathy Moriarty is memorable as Ruth, Woosley’s actress (and looks a lot like Faye Dunaway) and the great, Dante mainstay Dick Miller (he’s appeared in pretty much all of the director’s movies) has a small part as an employee of Woosley’s.
Oh, and did I mention that a young Naomi Watts has a tiny part as the protagonist of The Shook-Up Shopping Cart, a movie-within-the-movie that’s about an anthropomorphic shopping cart? It has to be seen to be believed.
Matinee is a very weird motion picture —it’s a teenage comedy, but also an homage to 50s monster movies, a historical piece about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Red Scare, and even an adventure picture, especially during the climax in the movie theatre. The tone is odd —sometimes serious, sometimes wacky, and even quite nostalgic at parts— and the first half is almost painfully uneven, but some funny dialogue and a very original sequence inside the screening of Mant! (best name ever for a monster movie, by the way) almost (but not quite) manages to make up for it.
Matinee was made for a very specific audience, which actually explains its failure at the box office. Movie-lovers, monster aficionados and John Goodman fans should enjoy it. Everyone else, will consider an odd diversion at best, and an anachronistic bore at worst. It’s not the worst film in Joe Dante’s filmography, but having seen it at last, I finally get why it doesn’t get mentioned in the same breath as Gremlins or The Howling.
