Matinee is a 1993 American comedy film directed by Joe Dante, written by Jerico Stone[3] and Charles S. Haas, and starring John Goodman, Cathy Moriarty, Simon Fenton, Omri Katz, Kellie Martin, and Lisa Jakub with supporting roles done by Robert Picardo and Jesse White (in his final theatrical film role).

It tells the story about a William Castle-type independent filmmaker promoting the premiere of his latest movie during the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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!

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.

Arriving in Florida with his actress girlfriend Ruth Corday, Woolsey finds the fearful atmosphere created by the ongoing crisis perfect for hosting the premier of Mant!

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.

Woolsey continues to devote himself to promoting Mant!, hiring Harvey to dress as the titular mutated half-man half-ant creature from the film.

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.

Matinee also mentions some of Woolsey's earlier horror movies: Island of the Flesh Eaters, The Eyes of Doctor Diablo, and The Brain Leeches (not to be confused with the real-world 1977 film of the same name).

"[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".

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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".