Matinee *** (1993, John Goodman, Cathy Moriarty, Simon Fenton, Omri Katz, Lisa Jakub) – Classic Movie Review 11,706

Director Joe Dante’s 1993 film Matinee is a touching, warm-hearted and gently funny comedy about a movie showman (the genial John Goodman) who takes his latest horror flick called Mant (half man, half ant) and a bag of sales gimmicks to a Florida cinema just as the Cuban missile crisis flares up in October 1962.

Will the picture house fall down? Will the world end? Will the audience laugh?

After a slow start, this picture builds to a crowd-pleaser about those far off film days, based on the career of William Castle, maker of The Tingler, fondly if incorrectly remembered as the producer who put electric shocks under the cinema seats.

The film stars John Goodman, Cathy Moriarty, Simon Fenton, Omri Katz, Lisa Jakub, Robert Picardo, Kellie Martin, and Jesse White (in his final theatrical film role). It is written by Jerico Stone and Charles S Haas, who also plays schoolteacher Mr Elroy.

Luke Halpin in Flipper (1963).

Also in the cast are Jesse Lee, Lucinda Jenney, James Villemaire, Robert Picardo, Dick Miller, John Sayles, David Clennon, Luke Halpin, William Schallert, Kevin McCarthy, and Robert O Cornthwaite.

Joe Dante recalled: ‘Matinee got made through a fluke. The company that was paying for us went out of business and didn’t have any money. Universal, which was the distributor, had put in a little money, and we went to them and begged them to buy into the whole movie, and to their everlasting sorrow they went ahead and did it.’ Film critics liked it, the public less so. It cost $13 million and earned $9.5 million.

The score is composed by Jerry Goldsmith but several music cues from previous horror films are also used.

It was shot from April 13 to June 19 1992 in and around Florida, including Cocoa, Maitland, and Key West in the Florida Keys. The school and cinema interiors were filmed at Universal Studios Florida in Orlando. The street scenes were shot at Oxnard, California.

For The Tingler, Castle bought military surplus airplane wing de-icers consisting of vibrating motors and had a crew travel from cinema to cinema, attaching them under some seats. At the film’s climax, one of the creatures supposedly gets loose in the cinema and vibrating buzzers were activated as the film’s star Vincent Price shouts ‘scream – scream for your lives!’

Dante cast Dick Miller (December 25, 1928 – January 30, 2019) in each of his movies up to Burying the Ex (2014), here as one of the men protesting the monster movie’s release, and as a soldier holding a sack of sugar.

 © Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,706

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