Review for Matinee

Introduction

I must have seen Matinee once, some twenty years ago, and I have little to no recollection of it, other that of its star, John Goodman. The film within a film however, Mant! has stuck in my mind ever since, a ‘Red Menace’ era sci-fi horror with the unforgettable atomically mutated fusion of man and ant. It so stayed with me that once or twice, idly browsing through a video shop (remember those?), I might have scanned a horror shelf for Mant!, completely forgetting that the film doesn’t exist outside the confines of Matinee. So I did the Internet equivalent of a double take when Matinee came up for review, initially putting it out of my mind, but the John Goodman image on the packaging, as well as the tagline of “Half Man... Half Ant... All Terror” made me look twice, and I finally recalled that this was the movie I watched two decades ago. After all this time, it will be like watching it again for the first time...

Lawrence Woolsey is an innovator, an entrepreneur, a showman, a movie mogul, the next big thing, or so he intends. The film industry has been losing ground to the box in the corner of the room for some time now, and has been trying to fight the decline with all manner of tricks and gimmicks, whether it’s widescreen, or 3D. Woolsey’s process makes all of that look like child’s play. With his next feature, Mant!, he’s introducing Atomo-vision and Rumble-rama. And if he can get the theatres interested, his days of living out of the back of his car will be over. It all comes down to the next showing in a local cinema in Key West, Florida. It’ll be a show that will blow the audience away. But as he arrives in Key West, hoping to make a killing, it’s October, 1962. Just a few hundred miles away, the Soviets have parked a bunch of nuclear missiles in Cuba, the superpowers are butting heads, and one false move and it will be more than just the audience that’s blown away.

Picture

The image is presented in 1.85:1 widescreen 1080p, with the occasional switch to 2.35:1 (years before the IMAX variable screen geometry craze). The picture is clear and stable throughout, with good, strong colours, excellent detail, and a nice level of film grain. Actually, it varies as to what you are watching. The main film is clear and sharp, and has the slightly subdued colour palette of the period, late eighties early nineties. Mant! is in monochrome, with a stronger grain structure, and a greater emphasis on contrast, darkness and light, while the other movie within a movie, The Shook-Up Shopping Cart is the one in scope format, and has the bright, Technicolor vividness of the 60s screwball comedy, the Doris Day movies and films of that nature. It looks like they were all shot on film stock appropriate to the style, with cinematography to match. There are no problems with inadvertent signs of age or print damage.

The images in this review were kindly supplied by Arrow Films.

Sound

The film is presented in PCM 2.0 Stereo English, with optional English subtitles. Actually I had to rely on the subtitles more than once, as deciphering 1960s teen-speak was a little difficult, with some of the dialogue occasionally buried in the soundtrack as well. But generally the audio experience with Matinee is pleasant enough, with some great period music accompanying the film, while Jerry Goldsmith’s score really captures the comedy action terror feel of the film.

Extras

The disc boots to an animated menu.

Matinee has had a couple of European releases, and a Japanese release, but this is its first Blu-ray release in an English language territory. The extras are a combination of featurettes commissioned for this release, as well as content taken from the French Blu-ray.

Bit Parts! The Joe Dante Players last 10:07 and is in 1080p HD. In it the director and some of his recurring cast are interviewed about their collaborations.

Atomo-Vision! Making Matinee lasts 8:04 HD, and in it cinematographer John Hora, and editor Marshall Harvey are interviewed.

Paranoia in Ant Vision is taken from the 2011 French Carlotta release, lasts 31:21, is presented in 1080i 50Hz, and is a much more in depth discussion about the making of the film. There are English subtitles for French screen captions.

In the Mant! section, you’ll find a 6:18 1080i 50Hz Foreword by Joe Dante, the Mant! movie-within-a-movie itself, edited together into a 16:09 1080p mini-feature, and the Mant! trailer, also 1080p and running to 3:32.

The Original EPK takes us behind the scenes of the film for a promotional 4:26, and is a 1080p upscale.

The Behind the Scenes Footage which lasts 8:21 too is a 1080p upscale.

There are 2:27 of Deleted and Extended Scenes.

Finally, the Theatrical Trailer is presented in 1080i 50Hz upscale 4:3.

The first pressing will also have a booklet featuring new writing on the film by David Jenkins.

Conclusion

There’s a point in one of the featurettes, where Joe Dante talks about films that gradually come of age, that are only appreciated after their time. Certainly there are plenty of films that we consider timeless classics these days, films like It’s A Wonderful Life, Blade Runner, and as I discovered quite recently, The Flight of the Phoenix, that could have been considered flops on their initial release. When you think of the great movies of the year 1993, I doubt that Matinee will be on the top of your list. And given its troubled genesis, with a story that the studio found difficult to market you can see why that would be the case. But twenty-odd years later, and given the benefit of a high definition re-evaluation, Matinee is really quite special, a comedy drama that works brilliantly by playing to our nostalgia, as well as the dread that my generation in particular experienced during the Cold War. It’s still mind-boggling to think that we’d escape from the tangible reality of the world coming to an end in a flash of atomic light, by going to the cinema to watch movies about the end of the world.

There’s a whole lot going on in Matinee, not least of which is the obvious tale of Lawrence Woolsey bringing his new movie and his new ‘process’ to Key West, to preview in front of an audience, and hopefully grab the attention of the theatre owners. It even hits the nostalgia buttons for me, as I still fondly recall when going to the cinema was all about the movies, and it was an affordable affair. Today, it’s cheaper for me to buy the things on Blu-ray after the fact, ticket prices being what they are, but I used to go to the cinema every week, watch whatever was playing, and I was happy to waste my money on the duds, as I discovered some unlikely gems along the way. I’m also just about old enough to remember the matinee, heading to the cinema as a child, although for me it was one feature film and a handful of cartoons, not two features as it was in the heyday of cinema, when children were kept out of their parents’ hair for whole afternoons.


It’s all about the creature features, the b-movie that sprung up around the fifties and sixties, informed by fears of the communist menace and nuclear Armageddon. Mant! is a spoof recreation of films like The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing. The Brain Eaters, films that were looked down upon in their time, but are now seen by many as veritable classics. It was all about appealing to audiences being drawn away from the cinema by the lure of television. So fantastic stories, lurid advertising with scantily clad women who’d never appear in the movie, and a guarantee of thrills and scares would try and tempt them back. It’s the kind of thing that filmmakers like Roger Corman are renowned for, and it’s no surprise that Matinee’s director Joe Dante himself comes from the school of Roger Corman.

And Lawrence Woolsey is a consummate showman, a P.T. Barnum of the movie theatre. He may be living out of his car, dragging his movie and the long suffering Carole around the USA, but he sells it big, appearing in his own movies to introduce them, fronting the trailers in silhouette with a big cigar, Hitchcock style. He pulls out all of the stops to sell his movie, stopping at nothing to attract an audience, and give them the ultimate theatre experience, in Atomo-vision and with Rumble-rama. He has even hired a couple of shills to ‘protest’ the movie, to increase the controversy and drum up more media interest. If Lawrence Woolsey weren’t a fictional character, Secret Cinema would owe him royalties.

The trick to Matinee is that, the film isn’t seen through Woolsey’s eyes, it’s seen through the eyes of a couple of Key West residents, teenaged horror film fans who are enthused about seeing the film. Gene Loomis is a Navy brat, has always moved around where the job has taken his father, and as a result, he has few friends, and less desire to make them. But he does take his kid brother Dennis to the movies, intent on scaring him with the latest b-movie horrors. It’s his love for horror that eventually gets him a friend at school in Stan, and as Stan tells him, you don’t go to the movies without a date. The typical teenage hormones are flowing, and it becomes about asking a girl out, especially for Stan, who may talk big, but can still trip over his tongue with the girl of his dreams, Sherry. The problem being that Sherry has an older ex-boyfriend Harvey, who’s just got out of juvenile detention, and isn’t keen on seeing Sherry hooking up with Stan.


This would all be drama enough, but it takes place on the weekend that the Cuban Missile Crisis comes to a head. Gene’s father is on a ship in the blockade, but the tension is palpable throughout the town, the school conducting ‘duck and cover’ drills, panic buying in the shops, and the cinema manager, stocking his bomb shelter under the cinema; everyone glued to the radio and the TV to see what will happen next. The key thing about Matinee is that while it is a brilliant comedy, it works best because it’s played straight. Woolsey just wants to promote his movie, sell his process, but the Key West residents are all on edge along with the rest of the world, worrying that this might be it, the end of it all. And somehow Woolsey’s glee at selling his movie, combined with the heightened emotions of the locals, especially the audience, makes Matinee a delightful farce.

Matinee may not have troubled the box office charts back in 1993, but a couple of decades distance gives the chance to re-evaluate this film. The period setting, the comedy and the drama, and the evocation of childhood nostalgia all combine to make it a very special movie, well worth taking a chance on today. And to that end, Arrow Films have given it the presentation that it deserves on this disc.