Joe Dante's Movie-Mad 1993 Masterpiece Matinee Finds the Sacred in the Absurd

Joe Dante’s lovely 1993 coming of age movie Matinee is, in its own loving, idiosyncratic way, a religious film. It is an act of devotion. But it is not religious in the usual sense. It is not about religion as we commonly know it. No, Matinee is about the Church of Cinephilia. It’s about the movie theater as a holy place, a sacred place, a haven away from the cold and callous outside world where the faithful gather and commune with something greater than themselves and their sometimes small lives.

Matinee is a hymn to the life-affirming, life-changing wonder of the moviegoing experience. It’s about a boy who finds God not in fiery Old Testament verses or ancient traditions but rather in the sense of wonder and awe that even a proudly ridiculous monster movie can evoke in the right disciple.

Dante is an overwhelmingly personal filmmaker who makes movies about what he loves and what fascinates him and that is often movies. Matinee allows Dante, with the help of screenwriter Charlie Haas (who worked with Dante repeatedly, most notably on Gremlins 2: The New Batch) to pay simultaneously reverent and irreverent homage to the world of b-movies from multiple angles.

Through the coming-of-age saga of monster movie aficionado and audience surrogate Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military brat whose father is in harm’s way at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dante and Haas lovingly chronicle the b-movie world through the wide eyes and uncritical enthusiasm of a true believer, the purest possible manifestation of the audience. Through the overlapping tale of filmmaker/showman Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman, gloriously larger than life), a lovable b-movie God inspired by William Castle, with a little of Dante’s mentor Roger Corman thrown in, Dante chronicles a world that he knows intimately, and loves all the same: the world of filmmaking at its least reputable and most rascally.

Matinee takes place in Key West in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis as the world wrestled with a monster almost beyond human imagination: the prospect that we would be obliterated in a nuclear holocaust if tensions surrounding Russian missile tests off the coast of Florida exploded into a full-on nuclear war.

Our juvenile hero’s soldier dad is terrifyingly close to the action but Gene has more important things to worry about than the possibility that his dad will die a violent death and/or civilization will end. There are girls, of course, most notably the peacenik daughter of a pair of beatnik/hippie-type free thinkers who makes a positive impression on our hero with an impassioned monologue in school about how all the “Duck and Cover” training in the world will be useless once people literally melt instantly during a nuclear attack.

More importantly, for Gene and for the movie, Key West is about to be visited by Woolsey, a sort of horror-movie P.T. Barnum who puts over his creaky low-budget horror movie shockers with an excess of showmanship and a never-ending string of gimmicks, many borrowed from Castle’s too-crazy-for-fiction career.

With his father away on life and death business and his mother understandably overcome with anxiety, Gene gravitates towards Lawrence as a surrogate father. Goodman plays the b-movie showman as an honest con artist, a man whose various schemes and hustles may be fraudulent but whose enthusiasm and passion for his curious art form could not be more sincere or infectious.

There’s a particularly poignant, heart-tugging moment when Lawrence gives his eager protege a spiel on the essence of cinema and escapism that begins with cave paintings and builds into a beautiful little prayer to the glory of cinema. Lawrence’s monologue about the almost incalculable value of even the most lurid, sensationalistic kind of movies is the most pure reflection of the film’s religious faith in the power of film.

Dante has enormous fun imagining Lawrence’s various schemes. Cathy Moriarty quietly steals scenes from Goodman (in one of his best performances) in the role of Lawrence’s longstanding leading lady, partner in crime and long-suffering girlfriend. She’s a practical woman uniquely immune from Lawrence’s carny charm, particularly when she’s recruited to pretend to be a “nurse” making sure that the kids in the theater don’t die of fright while watching Mant during its premiere. The actress is a deadpan delight when the screening of Mant devolves into madness and pandemonium and she’s continually asked for assistance from hurt children, and responds with the terse annoyance of the overworked, underpaid actress she is, not the nurse she’s very unconvincingly pretending to be.

The more you know about Dante, the more you will get out of Matinee. Dante fans will instantly recognize national treasure Dick Miller in the juicy role of a veteran actor in cheap horror movies (a role that of course references Miller’s history as the star of Corman classics like Bucket Of Blood as well as his long history with Dante) tasked with pretending to be part of a two-man uptight citizen’s organization protesting Lawrence’s movies in ways designed to make them seem as luridly appealing and irresistible as possible.

Fewer will recognize the actor playing Miller’s partner but the very observant will recognize him as an actor and screenwriter who has collaborated with Dante since 1978’s Piranha: arthouse legend John Sayles. Kevin McCarthy and Robert Picardo as a fussy theater manager round out a cast filled with Dante repertory players.

Gene’s profession and the cinema of the early 1960s affords Dante and Haas an opportunity to lovingly, knowingly spoof multiple genres. While waiting semi-patiently for Mant to blow their minds and make life worthwhile, young people take in Shook Up Shopping Cart (which is playing in a double feature with the tellingly titled Bashful Bobcat), a pitch-perfect spoof of the kind of high-concept live-action idiocy Disney cranked out in the 1960s and 1970s, often with Dean Jones or a young Kurt Russell in the lead.

Mant’s place of prominence within the narrative gives Dante and Haas an excuse for a loving, sustained send-up of monster mutation movies in the vein of The Fly. The film’s first half chronicles the build-up to the screening of Mant. The second half drinks in the craziness that ensues when a series of technical malfunctions and the bumbling of a juvenile delinquent with a love for writing poetry results in pandemonium, terror and panic onscreen and off.

Matinee is about the most important things in American life, in 1962 and today. It’s about childhood innocence and malevolence, about girls and friends and nuclear war and fear. It’s about dads both biological and symbolic. But more than anything, it’s about movies and the utterly essential role they play in our lives and in our dreams. It’s about the way they mold and shape us, how they implore us to dream and feed our imagination.

Late in the film, Gene tells Lawrence, ”You know, it’s hard to believe you’re a grown up.” Within the context of the film, it’s the highest praise imaginable. In Matinee, monster movies are an invitation to put off the dreary responsibilities of adulthood indefinitely and luxuriate in the innocent pleasure of perpetual childhood. It’s about movies both as life and as escape, and Matinee is a wonderful movie to escape into, especially now that it once again feels like the world might be ending due to monsters that, unlike Mant’s hapless titular character, have nothing to do with nuclear mutation.

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