Matinee (1993)
Matinee came out when I was 9 years old, I wanted to see it so badly. My mom wouldn’t let me, so I never watched it. It came to mind when I was watching “Little Shop of Horrors” a few weeks ago. I realized I had still not seen the movie, so I figured why not give it a whirl. Starring John Goodman as a B-Movie producer making Rodger Corman style cheeseball horror movies and taking place in Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is a ridiculous homage to the goofball mutant and monster movies of the past.
It’s a movie about a kid named Gene who loves scary movies and magazines. His father is in the U.S. Navy so the kid, with his mother and brother are stuck by themselves in a new town. He finds out that his favorite movie director, Lawrence Woolsey, is coming to town for the showing of his new movie “Mant”. Gene doesn’t have any friends at school because he is a military kid and they don’t like him because he likes weird things. All except for one other kid, obviously, the kid who used to be the lonely nerd. Gene spends most of his free time going to take his little brother to see movies and after a movie one day he runs in to Lawrence Woolsey running a scam with fake protesters outside the theater, but Gene happens to recognize one of them. After he looks through his magazines and finds out he is right he goes to question the film maker who spills the beans to Gene about the scam. Our side story is a standard romance thing for Genes friend where the girl he likes has a bad boy ex-boyfriend who comes to town solely to be mean to anyone else his former girlfriend might like. From there you can pretty much guess what happens the rest of the way.
The movie plays a lot on the fear and craziness around the early 60’s. It’s very hard for me to believe that anyone thought “duck and cover” would work to protect from a nuclear explosion, you would think that the fact that fire is hot would be enough to disprove this theory. My favorite characters, possibly the only ones I enjoyed at all are the sensible girl who doesn’t believe “duck and cover” and Lawrence Woolsey, John Goodman’s Character. I enjoyed the movie, it was a fun watch, but ultimately its not very good. It is too often predictable, and the story is pretty shallow. There are a few cameos from a couple actors from the genre back in the day. If you have young kids who think movies are real, well they won’t if you show them this. My big take away from “Matinee” is whether or not people actually acted like this in the early 60’s, and that “Atomo-Vision” and “Rumble Rama” was an early version of what we now call “D-Box”. I was quite surprised at how much this movie made me want to learn about actual history.
Finally, the film leaves us with two little tidbits of advice. The first is for children and that’s that grownups are all just making it up as they go along. The second regarding peace, “A couple weeks, a couple years, then bang somebody else comes up with another way for the world to end.” Sadly, describing a reality that would become all too true for far too many.