Available on Blu-Ray Mon 12 Sep 2016

Joe Dante has always been one of the more gentle of horror directors, if such an oxymoron can exist.  Gremlins was more of an anarchic comedy squib lobbed in the direction of small town America than an attempt to terrify, and with Matinee he takes a quietly satirical look at a similar target.

Unjustly forgotten nearly twenty-five years after its release, Matinee is a charming, evocative story of a group of youngsters and their brush with historical events that wouldn’t be out of place in the canon of Steven Spielberg, or the more sentimental works of Steven King.

Set in Key West, Florida on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, schlock horror producer Lawrence Woolsey (a superb John Goodman), arrives to preview his new monster movie Mant.  Playing on the very real threat of atomic war, his film is about a man who turns into a giant ant after being exposed to radiation.  Woolsey, a William Castle-style maverick who likes to fit electric buzzers under the seats of his audience, takes the burgeoning national crisis in his stride, insisting that his movie is just the tonic for the panicking townsfolk.

The focus dovetails between Woolsey and the lives of a group of boys and girls attending the film.  The air of nostalgia and the portentous feel of a momentous event reminds one instantly of Stand By Me, even if Dante’s historical stakes are far higher than in Rob Reiner’s film.  Both have that gorgeous, aching sense of its protagonists’ curiosity and burgeoning maturity that Stranger Things recently tapped into so well.

Dante’s heart is with those film buffs who grew up immersed in rickety old creature features, and Matinee is about escapism, about the power of film to pull you into another world, regardless of external strains and pressures.  Also, with the power of hindsight, it’s also about the last drip of a perceived American innocence.  The nuclear war didn’t materialise, and it was only another year until the events of Dallas brought it home that the greatest threats often emerge from within.

Matinee doesn’t quite have the power and the richness of character that made the likes of Stand By Me and Spielberg’s youth-orientated works such enduring classics.  The kids are rather sketchily characterised, with the exception of Gene (Simon Fenton), with whom Woolsey forms a master-pupil bond somewhat akin to that in Cinema Paradiso. There is also a slightly lack of dramatic weight.  Subplots involving the hoodlum ex-boyfriend of one character and a collapsing balcony in the cinema feel like they’ve been tacked on for extra narrative heft, and could have been jettisoned without losing the charm and joy of the piece.  For, very much like Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, Matinee is a little snapshot of a specific time and place and works perfectly as such.

Hopefully with this reissue Matinee can find a new audience.  Its relative obscurity is thoroughly undeserved, and there is much to love in a film bursting with affection for its subject.