A Joe Dante film reliably delivers plots involving a particular brand of American normalcy upended in chaotic fashion, dazzling practical effects, cinephilic easter eggs, and, of course, guest spots from Dick Miller and Kevin McCarthy. All are on full display in 1993’s Matinee, Dante's infectious ode to the atomic age and its cinematic output.
Over a few sunny autumn days in Key West, two things happen simultaneously: 90 miles away in Cuba, the Soviets position nuclear missiles, triggering a national panic; closer to home, director-producer and self-appointed "No. 1 Shock Expert" Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman) arrives to preview his latest creature feature at the Strand. Both events heighten tensions, especially for brothers Gene and Dennis Loomis (Simon Fenton and Jesse Lee, respectively)—army brats whose father is deployed on a Navy ship, and movie-mad teens who devour Famous Monsters of Filmland.
In Matinee, Woolsey and his leading lady, Ruth Corday (Cathy Moriarty), are touting their latest spectacle—MANT!—which combines the insect-transformation pathos of Kurt Neumann's The Fly (1958) with the radioactive paranoia of Them! (1954). Goodman's Woolsey is lovingly based on William Castle, the cigar-chomping B-movie auteur who loved to address movie audiences directly in both his trailers and features, usually touting some new form of extra-cinematic gimmickry. Classic Castle tricks that Dante pays homage to include: theater seats wired to buzz at climactic moments (The Tingler, 1959), a nurse doling out life insurance policies in case audience members expire from fright (Macabre, 1958), and a flying skeleton floating over the audience's heads (House on Haunted Hill, 1959). Dante also throws in "Rumble Rama," a nod to Earthquake's seat-rattling subwoofer antics. In the end, though, Woolsey and Dante offer an incendiary climax that Castle never dreamed up.
But despite all these artificial terrors, the image that truly haunts these characters—boomer innocents facing their first existential travails—is that of a mushroom cloud. Though dosed with sentimentality, Matinee laces its loss-of-innocence story with a sly nod to dangers ahead. The film's final frames show a helicopter. At first glance it may seem like a winking tribute to Dante's early days working for Roger Corman, wherein the king of exploitation famously asked the future director to insert a shot of an exploding chopper into every trailer he cut, regardless of whether the shot actually appeared in the film being advertised. But a closer look reveals the airship as a touch of foreshadowing: in a few years' time, some of these fresh-faced boys will be drafted to fly in some of these very helicopters into a full-scale proxy war. For now, though, they can hide in the dark wonder of a movie theater and watch their fears and dreams unspool.
Matinee screens Sunday, March 29, at the Orinda Theatre as part of the series "A Weekend with Joe Dante." He and actor Robert Picardo, here playing an uptight theater owner, will be on hand for Q&As for all screenings.
