Matinee

Joe Dante's most personal film, telling two things at once: the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the business of cheap horror. Lawrence Woolsey is a travelling producer-director who arrives in Key West to promote his new picture, Mant!, about a creature half man and half ant, and the sum of every 1950s cliché. Woolsey rigs the cinema with buzzing seats, shock devices and fake doctors in the lobby. The character is built on William Castle, who really did fly skeletons over audiences and wire seats with electricity. Dante shot the film-within-the-film properly; the Mant! sequences are a real 1950s pastiche, with the right cameras and the right cutting. But Key West is ninety miles from Cuba. While the town's children are scared of a monster in a cinema, an actual nuclear threat sits offshore, and this is where the film says its piece: fear is bearable as long as you can buy a ticket to it. John Goodman plays Woolsey, with Cathy Moriarty as his partner. Who it is for: viewers with affection for film history and a knowledge of 1950s horror. Who it is not for: anyone wanting tension. It is warm, nostalgic and safe; the crisis stays in the background.