Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Matinee is better than "Lobsterman from Mars", 25 Mar 2007
A promoter of movies is coming to town. This is at the height of the bomb scare era. A boy from the near by base in Florida and a mysteriously girl that is a free thinker with a more realistic concept of nuclear destruction strike up a friendship with the promoter.
This movie has the same concept of spoofing most of our favorite bug movies. It also has an underlying script, which changes this movie from a "Lobsterman From Mars (1990), to more of an "A Christmas Story (1983)" feel. You could have been there in the 60's. And footage is shown from the real films that it is spoofing. And once again the MANT (man-ant) has his appendages where they don't belong.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Joe Dante is God, 4 Jan 2004
Dante does it again. You may not know who Dante is, but if you were born sometime in the 70's or very early 80's (like me), you will most certinly have seen many of his films and be in love with at least one. This guy is a genius, master of the fun, feelgood films (mostly 80's), just look at this for a career:
The Howling ('81), Gremlins ('84), Explorers ('85), Innerspace ('87) The 'burbs ('89), Gremlins 2 ('90), Matinee ('92)! He's even directed for the excellent TV shows Police Squad and Eerie Indianna.Matinee is as much fun as Dante's earlier work. This is probably the only 90's movie to capture the essence of those wonderful fun/feelgood films that practically began and ended in the 80's. As well as what's above think The Goonies, American Werewolf in London, Lost Boys, Scrooged, Ghostbusters, Little Shop of Horrors...I could go on. If you like the above, you will also like this. Set at the time of the Cuban missile crisis and based on Director William Castle, John Goodman plays a filmmaker who comes to a small town to sell his movie, as the film plays he uses gimmicks such as electric buzzers in chairs, fireworks and a guy in an ant costume running up and down the isles scaring people (Castle did actually use such tricks - that musta been a hoot!) all in an attempt to get his movie distributed nationwide and win back the prestige he once had.
The movie within the movie, 'Mant' is great fun to watch and it's almost a shame this isn't an actual film itself!
A fun, amusing film that leaves you wanting more...!
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Underrated but superb - one of my favourite films ever!, 1 Mar 2009
I watched this again recently, knowing how much I had enjoyed it before, but I found myself enjoying it even more. It appears to be a simple tale of a cynical but ambitious film producer arriving in a small Florida backwater to promote a horror movie about a man who turns into a giant ant (Mant!) at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. In fact, it's about so much more.
It's a film about the nature of fear, a tender coming-of-age comedy, a nostalgic eulogy to the days of 'atomic age' monster films and their whacky promotional gimmicks (John Goodman's producer is clearly based on William Castle who, among other things, electrocuted his audiences during The Tingler and had a plastic skeleton fly over their heads like an emaciated Mary Poppins in The House on Haunted Hill) and, most of all, it's a film about our love of going to the pictures as eloquent as Cinema Paradiso.
As in Peter Bogdanovich's Targets, the comically ludicrous film-within-a-film and its absurd horror cliches contasts with a much more real horror going on off-screen - here Krushchev and Kennedy taking the world to the brink of armageddon.
Everything about this film is spot on: John Goodman is at his very best and the rest of the cast, though largely unknown, never put a foot wrong. The teenage hero, Simon Fenton, is actually a British actor (perfect American accent) who later appeared in The Bill! The cinema is one you would love to be your local picture house - such a contrast to the multiplexes of today. The satirical critique of mutually assured distruction may be less shrill than in Dr Strangelove but is more human and therefore, to me, more powerful. Even the use of period music is perfect, in particular of The Lion Sleeps Tonight as the crisis is averted and the world sleeps soundly again...for now.
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