Matinee
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Overlook Film Festival 2023: American Monsters and Final Musings (Matinee, The Tingler, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster)
The last official day of Overlook arrived, and I was pleased to spend it watching a double feature of Joe Dante’s Matinee (a special 30th anniversary screening) and William Castle’s 1959 film The Tingler. The double header was programmed by Dante himself, and after the screening I was scheduled to conduct a 20-minute interview with the director. I’d seen Matinee before, and upon re-watch was struck again by how lush and detailed each aspect of the film’s production is. The set decoration only creeps up on ‘60s-era pastiche, managing to evoke nostalgic memory more than hokey over-stylization. Even the wardrobe […]
by Natalia Keogan on Apr 27, 2023 -
“Self-Aware Doesn’t Work for Us”: Joe Dante on The Movie Orgy, Matinee at 30 and William Castle’s The Tingler
All of Joe Dante‘s films revolve around distinctly American paranoias—consumerism, threats to the nuclear family, suburban NIMBY sensibilities—but none feel more entrenched in a tangible era of American anxiety than Matinee. Now 30 years old, the film takes place during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, centering B-movie shlock jockey Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman, riffing big time on William Castle), who lands in a panicked Key West, Florida for a promotional screening of his radioactive new horror film Mant (half-man, half-ant, all monster!) Both enraptured and horrified by the real-world implications Woolsey’s film hints at (nuclear disfigurement, neighborhoods-turned-warzones, the […]
by Natalia Keogan on Apr 10, 2023
