From his early work like the Roger Corman-produced “Hollywood Boulevard” and the found footage extravaganza “The Movie Orgy” to the deliriously self-referential “Gremlins” films and “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” Joe Dante has always been one of the most cine-literate of all directors, a filmmaker preoccupied with our relationship to the movies we watch and with cinema’s larger role in the culture. Dante’s 1993 comedy “Matinee” is possibly his greatest film in this regard, a meditation on the role horror movies play in our lives and a love letter to the people who make them. It follows a few days in the lives of kids who live on a Florida military base during the buildup to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962; as the terror of the real world increases, they take refuge in the monster movies of Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman), a producer who arrives in town to screen his latest horror flick, “Mant!.”
“Matinee” is, like many of Dante’s movies, a film of profound ideas that never strains for seriousness — it’s affectionate, hilarious, and swiftly paced, letting its philosophical concerns find expression in the characterizations rather than explicit moralizing or preaching. It’s also rich in meticulous period detail, with a vivid sense of time and place partly attributable to Dante’s personal connection to the material — in 1962, he was around the same age as the boy at the movie’s center and obsessed with the same things. For all its specificity, however, the movie’s depiction of adolescent horror love and its insightful exploration of how horror movies help us cope with reality is timeless and universal; the ideas here have as much resonance now as they would have had in 1962, or in 1993 when Dante made the movie.
This makes Shout! Factory‘s reissue of the film on 4K UHD and Blu-ray cause for celebration. The new disc boasts a 4K restoration from the original camera negative supervised by Dante and is packed with hours of special features, including interviews, deleted and extended scenes and a new audio commentary by Dante enthusiasts Drew McWeeny and Eric Vespe. There are also extras devoted to the movie-within-a-movie, “Mant!,” which only appears in excerpts throughout “Matinee” but works as its own hilarious tribute to atomic age creature features like “Them!” and “Tarantula.” In order to give the kids in the movie something to react to, Dante shot “Mant!” before the rest of his material on “Matinee” and populated it with actors from the era (Robert Cornthwaite, William Schallert, Kevin McCarthy) while giving it a look that would recall the higher-end monster movies of the period.
“It was intended to look like a fairly high-end B picture from the 1960s that you might find being produced at a studio,” Dante told IndieWire, acknowledging that this was a bit anachronistic given that Woolsey was based on the fiercely independent William Castle. “I was aware that I was cheating because William Castle never made any big bug movies. He made a little bug movie, but he never made any big bug movies.” Because Dante wanted to convey the effect “Mant!” would have on its impressionable young audiences, he tried to take it as seriously as possible. “The easiest thing to do with this kind of parody is to make it look cheap and crappy, and I couldn’t do that, because I was seeing it through the eyes of the kids in the movie. When I was a kid watching these movies, I didn’t look for seams, I didn’t look for wires. I wanted it to be real, and I think the better of those movies really managed to accomplish that feat.”
That provided Dante with a guiding principle for his department heads. “We said, ‘Well, let’s make this picture look as good as a state-of-the-art movie in 1962 would be,’” he said. “Now, again, we’re cheating because by 1962, they had stopped making those movies, but you know, we took a little dramatic license.” The attempt to take things seriously extended to the veteran actors like Cornthwaite. “He had been in the original ‘The Thing’ and was really a consummate actor. He treated this stuff like it was Shakespeare.” If the dialogue Cornthwaite and others speak in “Mant!” sounds authentic, that’s because a lot of it was lifted straight from director Bert I. Gordon’s B-movies; Gordon’s unusual writing style gives “Mant!” some of its biggest laughs: “If he used a big word, he would always try to define it in the same sentence so that kids would understand it. It made for some rather odd line readings.”
Dante gives his actors credit for intuitively knowing how to sell the awkward Bert I. Gordon exposition. “It was quite apparent that the way you do it is to just play it straight,” he said. “It doesn’t work if you wink. One of the reasons these movies are still popular years later is that the people on screen are giving their all and trying to make you believe in all this stuff.” Dante found that when he cast John Goodman as Woolsey he had a kindred spirit in his affection for Castle, Gordon, and the big bug movies of the 1960s. “I went to the trouble of putting together a reel of Castle trailers to acquaint him with Castle’s work and John said, ‘Are you kidding? I went to these movies as a kid. I know who this guy is. I know exactly how to play him.’ And he did.”
“Mant!” is such a pleasure to watch that many fans have long wondered if there’s an even longer version of the movie that Dante could release as a complete feature, and Dante was approached by a foreign distributor at some point with a serious inquiry into whether “Mant!” could be released separately. “I was asked, ‘Do you have any more ‘Mant’ footage? Could we put it all together and release it as a movie? And I suggested that, you know, what plays pretty funny for 20 minutes might not play so well for 75.”
“Matinee” is now available as a special edition 4KUHD and Blu-ray from Shout! Factory.
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