The first time I watched Joe Dante's Matinee, I thought it was a clever but minor film about William Castle-style showmanship. I watched it again last night, and was struck with its odd profundity, a meditation on the linkage between youth, horror and war, a perfect sidebar for David J. Skal's book The Monster Show (recently reissued) that charts the history of atrocity through horror fiction. Against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the kids of Key West are concerned not only with the impending nuclear holocaust, but also with a man transformed by x-rays into a gigantic man-ant, Mant. This is the latest opus of showman director Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman), whom one of the young heroes says "it's surprising he's a grown-up". That's high praise indeed in a movie where the adults are either manic or incompetent or both. A merchant of schlock, he knows full-well what might happen outside Cuba, and knows there's nothing he can do about it. With his faithful star/companion Ruth Corday (Cathy Moriarity) he sells nuclear annihilation fantasy as a distraction from real nuclear annihilation. But the line isn't always so clear. At a key moment the theater manage mistakes Woolsey's "rumble-rama" for bombs dropping and runs for his bomb shelter in panic. When Woolsey's teenage assistant threatens to destroy the theater Woolsey clears it by projecting a mushroom cloud and a raging fire onto the screen.
Navy brat Gene (Simon Fenton) reads Famous Monsters of Filmland and fears for his father on a ship in the Gulf. In a lot of ways he's much like I was five or six years ago- smart, sensitive, not shy but reticent around girls. Pint-sized conscientious objector Sandra (a very cute Canadian girl named Lisa Jakub) makes an adorable and strong-willed counterpart for him, standing tall and getting hauled to the principal's office for objecting to "duck and cover" and seeming touchingly small when Gene asks her out later. My favourite moment for her is when her pre-hippie parents being to launch into why it's not the government's place to tell us what to do and she says "I know" perfectly, with a note of bemused petulance. Gene and Sandra make an ideal pair who know exactly what to do when locked up in a fallout shelter together. Woolsey prophecises they'll have a great future - "They've already seen the coming attractions."
Dante obviously had a lot of fun with the film within a film, Mant, and it comes off much better than in Amazon Women on the Moon because here it has context. The movie borrows elements of The Fly, Hideous Sun Demon and The Incredible Shrinking Man, and sports such hilarious lines as "Human-insect mutation isn't exactly an exact science," and a scientist who contest feels the need to clarify his language when there's a woman in the room. And it features a giant radioactive insect clawing at a skyscraper, a much more tangible fate than nuclear holocaust. Dante reminds us that low art can express the zeitgeist as clearly as high art, and I that is a rare gift indeed.
Navy brat Gene (Simon Fenton) reads Famous Monsters of Filmland and fears for his father on a ship in the Gulf. In a lot of ways he's much like I was five or six years ago- smart, sensitive, not shy but reticent around girls. Pint-sized conscientious objector Sandra (a very cute Canadian girl named Lisa Jakub) makes an adorable and strong-willed counterpart for him, standing tall and getting hauled to the principal's office for objecting to "duck and cover" and seeming touchingly small when Gene asks her out later. My favourite moment for her is when her pre-hippie parents being to launch into why it's not the government's place to tell us what to do and she says "I know" perfectly, with a note of bemused petulance. Gene and Sandra make an ideal pair who know exactly what to do when locked up in a fallout shelter together. Woolsey prophecises they'll have a great future - "They've already seen the coming attractions."
Dante obviously had a lot of fun with the film within a film, Mant, and it comes off much better than in Amazon Women on the Moon because here it has context. The movie borrows elements of The Fly, Hideous Sun Demon and The Incredible Shrinking Man, and sports such hilarious lines as "Human-insect mutation isn't exactly an exact science," and a scientist who contest feels the need to clarify his language when there's a woman in the room. And it features a giant radioactive insect clawing at a skyscraper, a much more tangible fate than nuclear holocaust. Dante reminds us that low art can express the zeitgeist as clearly as high art, and I that is a rare gift indeed.