We’ve all heard tales of the ‘good old days’.  No, not the days when people used a giant ice cube in a plywood box to keep their food fresh.  And, not when guys rode those weird bicycles with one giant wheel on the front and one tiny wheel on the back.  I mean the days when William Castle was allowed to put electrode in the butt of theatre chairs to get a little extra scare into The Tingler, or filming things in ‘Electro-scope’ or ‘Horror-vision’, or selling life insurance in the theatres lobby in case the movie ‘scared you to death’.  Those good old days!  And, that’s basically what the movie Matinee is about.

 

     Matinee stars John Goodman as Lawrence Woolsey, basically a William Castle-type producer who takes his movies from town to town selling them not on their artistic value but through shock and fear or controversy or anything else he can whip up to get butts into seats!  The movie he’s promoting when we meet him is Mant, half-man, half-ant, all-terror!  If you’ve ever loved ‘b’ movies from the 50’s or 60’s…and who among us hasn’t?  Then you’re gonna love Matinee.  It’s the story of a young boy who truly loves horror movies, as all young boys do, getting to meet one of his heroes (Woolsey) and learning what it means to be in the ‘b’ movie business.  Woolsey isn't a film-maker, he's a carnival huckster who's using movies to make a buck.  But, he's not evil, he's just a guy who loves bad movies and wants to make a living.  This is a movie you’ll really love, if you, like me, used to lock yourself in the house on those beautiful summer Saturdays to watch Tarantula, or gave up a great fishing trip with your grandfather because Channel 25 was showing Godzilla and Son of Godzilla back to back.  If you didn’t do those things, you'll probably like the sub-plot, I think it was something about the Cuban Missile Crisis and some coming-of-age stuff, I’m not really sure, there was a really cool half-man, half-ant on the screen and I got distracted.