In October 1962, in Key West, Florida, Gene Loomis and his younger brother, Dennis, live on a military base with their mother Anne while their father is away on a United States Navy submarine. At a local movie theater one afternoon, Gene and Dennis see a promo for an exclusive engagement of producer Lawrence Woolsey's sensational new horror film, entitled Mant! Woolsey is scheduled to appear in-person at the theater the following Saturday. After the boys return home to the base, the Loomis family watches President Kennedy deliver a speech confirming the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Meanwhile, arriving in Florida with his actress girlfriend, Ruth Corday, Woolsey finds the fearful atmosphere created by the ongoing crisis perfect for hosting Mant!'s premiere.
Woolsey has brought along two of his actors, Herb Denning, a former hired thug, and Bob, a victim of the Hollywood blacklist now relegated to cheap, independent B movies, to pose as outraged citizens protesting Mant!'s theatrical exhibition. However, local couple Jack and Rhonda advocate for allowing the premiere based on First Amendment rights. Later, at home, while reading an issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Gene recognizes Herb as having starred in an earlier Woolsey film, The Brain Leeches.
At school, Gene gradually befriends one of his classmates, Stan. He also becomes infatuated with Jack and Rhonda's daughter Sandra after she receives a week-long detention for protesting against the uselessness of a "duck and cover" air raid drill, insisting that immediately dying from the effects of an atom bomb is preferable to dying from acute radiation syndrome caused by fallout. Stan has a crush on another girl at school, Sherry. However, violent juvenile delinquent (and aspiring poet) Harvey Starkweather, her ex-boyfriend, threatens Stan, so he lies to her out of fear, calling off their first date.
Woolsey continues to devote himself to promoting Mant!, hiring Harvey to dress as the mutated half-man, half-ant creature from the film. He also installs large subwoofer-type speakers as the first phase of a new film gimmick he names "Rumble-Rama". The cinema's manager, Howard, warns about Rumble-Rama's potential effects on the old and fragile balcony area, which has a maximum capacity of 100 people. At the Saturday matinee, Sherry encounters Stan, who is attending the premiere screening with Gene and Dennis. Initially upset that he deceived her, she later reconciles with him when Gene intercedes on the couple's behalf. Sandra attends the premiere with her parents, but leaves them to watch the film with Gene. When Harvey (costumed as the Mant! monster) sees Sherry and Stan kissing during the film, he attacks Stan in a rage, then punches Woolsey after he tries to intervene, and a chase ensues. Stan takes a shotgun from a fallout shelter located in the theater's basement and uses it to frighten off Harvey. Sandra and Gene are unintentionally locked inside the shelter when the door is accidentally closed and its time-lock activated. While trapped inside, the two comfort each other, eventually sharing their first kiss.
Woolsey helps rescue the pair from the shelter before their oxygen supply runs out. Harvey reappears and holds his switchblade to Ruth's throat, demanding the movie premiere's cash receipts from Woolsey. As he steals the cash, he kidnaps Sherry and escapes. Howard immediately calls the police, and Harvey is quickly arrested after crashing Woolsey's Cadillac outside the movie theater. Sherry and Stan happily reunite after this ordeal. Woolsey also realizes that Harvey has turned the "Rumble-Rama" machinery up so high that the now-overcrowded theater balcony is starting to collapse from the heavy sound vibrations. Assisted by Gene, Woolsey projects trompe-l'œil footage of an atomic bomb mushroom cloud that appears to blast a hole through the screen and the theater's outside wall, quickly evacuating the now panicked audience to safety.
After the Cuban missile crisis has ended, Ruth and Woolsey leave for another premiere in Cleveland, bidding goodbye to Sandra and Gene. Woolsey has grown fond of the two kids, telling Ruth he might like to have two children after they marry. Sandra and Gene watch them drive away in Woolsey's new Cadillac. Navy helicopters fly over the beaches in Key West, implying that Gene's father will soon return home.
Joe Dante says the financing of the film was difficult:
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. [Laughs.][4]
Principal photography began on April 13, 1992. Filming took place in and around the state of Florida, including the towns of Cocoa, Maitland, and Key West. The interior sequences in the school and the movie theater were filmed on set at Universal Studios Florida in Orlando. The street scenes were filmed in Oxnard, California. Production was completed on June 19, 1992.
Joe Dante had cast character actor Dick Miller in each of his movies, casting him in Matinee as one of the men protesting the monster movie's release, and as a soldier holding a sack of sugar in Mant. Also appearing in supporting roles are William Schallert and Robert O. Cornthwaite (who both appeared in scores of low-budget films of all genres); Kevin McCarthy (perhaps best remembered for his role in Invasion of the Body Snatchers) as well as Robert Picardo, both of whom appeared in several of Dante's films. John Sayles, who collaborated with Dante on earlier films, appears as one of the men who is protesting the release of Mant.
Matinee was released on January 29, 1993 in 1,143 theatres. It ranked at #6 at the box office, grossing $3,601,015 in its opening weekend. The film went on to gross $9,532,895 in its theatrical run.
Reception
Matinee received critical acclaim and has a 93% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes, based on 42 reviews with an average rating of 7.7/10. The website's critical consensus reads "Smart, funny, and disarmingly sweet, Matinee is a film that film buffs will love -- and might even convert some non-believers."[7]
Roger Ebert gave the film three and half out of four stars and wrote "There are a lot of big laughs in Matinee, and not many moments when I didn't have a wide smile on my face".[8] Gene Siskel gave the film three and half out of four stars and remarked that the "boring title...doesn't communicate the joy within this film".[9] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote "Matinee, which devotes a lot of energy to the minor artifacts of American pop culture circa 1962, is funny and ingenious up to a point. Eventually, it becomes much too cluttered, with an oversupply of minor characters and a labored bomb-and-horror-film parallel that necessitates bringing down the movie house".[10]Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B+" rating, and Owen Gleiberman wrote, "In Matinee, Dante has captured the reason that Cold War trash like Mant struck such a nerve in American youth: The prospect of atomic disaster was so fanciful and abstract that it began to merge in people's imaginations with the very pop culture it had spawned. In effect, it all became one big movie. Matinee is a loving tribute to the schlock that fear created".[11]
In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Peter Rainer wrote of Dante's film: "He pulls out his bag of tricks and even puts in an animated doodle; he's reaching not only for the flagrant awfulness of movies like MANT but also for the zippy ardor of the classic Warner Bros. cartoons. He does everything but put a buzzer under your seat".[12] In his review for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote "At the same time that Dante has a field day brutally satirizing our desire to scare ourselves and others, he also re-creates early-60s clichés with a relish and a feeling for detail that come very close to love".[13] In her review for The Washington Post, Rita Kempley wrote "In this funny, philosophical salute to B-movies and the B-moguls who made them, Dante looks back fondly on growing up with the apocalypse always on your mind and atomic mutants lurking under your bed".[14] In his review for the USA Today, Mike Clark wrote "Part spoof, part nostalgia trip and part primer in exploitation-pic ballyhoo, Matinee is a sweetly resonant little movie-lovers' movie".[15]
