Matinee

Certainly John Goodman portraying Lawrence Woolsey as a film director bent on all kinds of creative devices to lure audiences in to see his sci-fi/horror movies is a homage to the King of Gimmicks himself, William Castle. This movie is not great by any standards, but it sure is a lot of fun. It is a trip down memory lane for many. Although I am not old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis nor William Castle movies premiering, I am given a pretty accurate feel of the times through Matinee. The best part of the movie, however, is the movie within a movie....MANT...the story of a man that is half-man and half-ant. The scenes of this film alone are good enough reason to see Matinee. The one scene where the Mant character throws an ant farm to the ground and yells "You're free, You're free" is hilarious. The movie characters are also made up of old sci-fi stars Kevin McCarthy(Invasion of the Body Snatchers), William Shallert(Hundreds of films it seems), and Robert Cornwaithe(The Thing). Also look for John Sayles and Dick Miller in smaller roles hamming it up. Goodman is larger than life in his portrayal, much the same way that Castle was. And certainly, we in the audience that are great genre fans dream what it would have been like to help William Castle...I mean Lawrence Woolsey...make a picture.

I had just recently watched Matinee for the first time in a few years. I forgot how much fun and how very funny a film it was. Having grown up watching some of William Castle's and Roger Corman's hokey but very entertaining early horror films it was like a stroll down memory lane on my Saturday's. Goodman captured the essence of a movie showman who always had or wanted to have a gimmick to go with his B movie pictures. Cathy Moriarty is excellent as his favorite leading lady. I must be showing my age because I still remember the duck and cover and other little things associated with everyday life and times during the late 1950's and early 1960's that were in the movie. The movie was entertaining and a very nice parody, if not dedication to the men who made B movies as part of our culture. I have to believe this dedication to men like Corman and Castle would have to be a bit of a tongue in cheek parody for it to be a very sincere dedication. The movie does an excellent job of bring back the life and times and the performances as pretty good. Aaaahhhh the memories. The cold war and much simpler times and classic B movies. It don't get any better than this.

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.

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.

Watching this movie really made me happy that some of William Castle's films have finally been coming out on DVD in the last couple of years, through both traditional DVD releases and through the Warner Archive manufacture on demand program. At any rate, enjoy.

When a light-hearted, nostalgic comedy opens with a nuclear explosion, you know you're onto something weird and original. Yet it's also comfortingly familiar. Matinée was made seven years after Back to the Future and is set (in 1962) seven years afterwards. In its style and tone it echoes Robert Zemeckis's blockbuster, but it wasn't embraced nearly so warmly by audiences.

Maybe it's because the backdrop is the harder sell of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Gene (Simon Fenton) is a young teen who lives on a naval base, and he's coming to terms with an absent military father who may never return. Some solace is arriving, however, as the B-movie tycoon Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman) is coming to town to show off his new half-man/half-ant opus… "Mant".

The film establishes a broad cast of characters to populate Key West, including Gene's buddy Stan (Omri Katz), who's obsessed with the flirty Sherry (Kellie Martin). Gene himself, meanwhile, is courting the CND-conscious Sandra (Mrs Doubtfire's Lisa Jakub). While the parents panic about the impending nuclear annihilation, the schoolboys bicker and talk about girls.

The first half of the movie focuses on establishing the many characters, while the second half is dominated by the premiere of Mant itself and the (mostly) orchestrated chaos surrounding it. Suffice to say, the build-up – which does suffer slightly from minor character overload – is justified by the pay-off. The kids must sign a waiver before entering the theatre, and with good reason. "This crowd is turning into a mob," the producer yells at Woolsey – "congratulations!"

Writer Charles S. Haas has a brilliant ear for taut, funny dialogue that doesn't rely on punchlines, and the teenage dynamics are brilliantly observed. (The boys, anyway – the girls are more thinly sketched.) At the core of the film is Woolsey, whom we first see in Hitchcock-style silhouette, warning the audience about "atomic mutation". Goodman absolutely relishes his role, gleefully feeding his "AtomoVision!" and "Rumble-Rama!" to an audience hungry for event movie gimmicks.

Woolsey sees a business opportunity in the lightning-in-a-bottle moment of the Missile Crisis, keen to capitalise on the heightened national anxiety. Yet rather than making him the monster, the film skilfully presents Woolsey as a hero. Through him the film puts forth its paen to cinema as entertainment, and also a philosophical argument for the cathartic value of movie monsters as a way of exorcising a society's demons.

As with Tim Burton's masterpiece Ed Wood, director Joe Dante displays total affection for his subject matter, namely the monster flicks of the 1950s and '60s. Every period movie you can think of is referenced, but particularly Kurt Neumann's The Fly. We see plenty of footage of Mant and it is entirely convincing (by which I mean appropriately unconvincing), and avoids mocking its myriad sources.

"Put the insect aside!" one character begs the half-man/half-ant, to which he replies, "Insecticide? Where?!" Meanwhile, in the world of Dante's film, Woolsey is hurling special effects around the auditorium, spilling smoke and rumbling seats, literally bringing the house down. When the Mant cast start directly referencing the Matinée audience, who are in turn being watched by us, it feels like Amblin's answer to Inception.

For those who enjoy the smart satire of The 'Burbs and the frenetic farce of Gremlins, this is a similarly genre-dodging yet relatively overlooked Dante classic. It's a film about films they don't make anymore – and, in our less kind-spirited age of comedy archness, they really don't make them like this anymore.

This movie explores the marketing and the premier of a B-movie horror flick by a virtual one-man studio (remember American International?) in, of all places Key West during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I think this was intended to be a vehicle for John Goodman as the B-movie "impresario" Lawrence Woolsey (great casting!), with Cathy Moriarty also excellently cast as the jaded B-movie starlet and Woolsey's companion. Simon Fenton plays a young, wide-eyed, horror movie addict who is also a military kid, whose father has just been assigned to the naval blockade around Cuba. The cast also includes Dick Miller from the Gremlin series, and many other B-movies since the 1950's including the original Shop of Horrors.

Matinee is quirky, and the "movie within a movie," called "Mant" (half man, half ant), is about a silly accidental "mutation" of a man into a rather large insect The movie contains a good sampling of all the plot devices (on screen and off screen) used in these sorts of movies. The now-hilarious atomic horrors depicted in "Mant" are juxtaposed against the real-life horrors of the nuclear missile crisis, with interesting effect.

Matinee also offers a lot of not-so-subtle counterpoints between the atmosphere and common wisdom of the era (anybody remember Civil Defense drills? Bomb shelters? The "four" basic food groups?), and its stark comparison to what we know/think today. When this movie was made, the cold war was just over, and a look back to the pervasive feel throughout the 50's and 60's and its worrying about the "bomb" and anti-commie lingo makes the people of this era look supremely paranoid and silly, until one thinks about how even this has changed since the movie was made (think post 9-11: who's silly and paranoid now?).

The movie is enjoyable on many levels, although I feel the comparisons between the 60's and "today" could have been made a bit more subtle. As a counterpoint, my wife, who was never a fan of the horror movie genre, dislikes this movie--she also disliked "Ed Wood" for the same reason.

All in all, it's a wonderful movie that I'm glad to have in my VHS collection.