It Came from Inner Space

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: MATINEE

DIRECTOR: JOE DANTE

WRITER: CHARLIE HAAS

THE BOTTOM LINE: A casual manner belies a bright satirical intelligence in a short, sharp period comedy.

In his own eerily confident mind, Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman) is both a motion-picture visionary and a good old-fashioned showman. To his critics -- just about every zit-free moviegoer in the country -- he's a schlockmeister, producer of a string of cheapo '50s horror movies in which mutant monsters, by-products of nuclear carelessness, at once symbolize and exploit everyone's edginess about the recently unleashed atom.

But wait a minute. It's 1962; the New Frontier has been proclaimed. As Woolsey heads to Key West, Florida, to preview his latest epic, Mant (half- man, half-ant and all knockoff of cult classics like The Fly and Them!), he and his works appear to have reached a new frontier of their own -- total cultural irrelevancy. Except for one thing: the Cuban missile crisis is on, and suddenly the brave new world is actually contemplating a disaster beyond Woolsey's most profitable dreams. It's a nicely imagined coincidence, and from it Joe Dante has fashioned a neat little movie -- less flashy than his Gremlins films but in its way much sharper.

Charlie Haas' script deftly twists three satirical strands together. There is, of course, the movie within the movie, a perfectly pitched and hilarious genre send-up, complete with a woman in perpetual peril (Cathy Moriarty, who is also wonderful as Woolsey's wearied girlfriend). The preview is a riotous muddle at which Woolsey's gimmicks -- Atomo-Vision, Rumble-Rama -- run out of control and literally threaten to bring down the house.

Matinee also offers a dislocating representation of Mant's teenage audience. Among them are a straight arrow shunned by his schoolmates, a fast girl, a juvenile delinquent -- the Gidget crowd, in short. A good point is scored about the seepage between the realities of adolescent life and the ways it is portrayed in the media. Finally, Matinee assaults the general goofiness of American life in the period -- bomb shelters, duck-and-cover air-raid drills, general prudishness and even stupid nutritional beliefs.

This is a lot of business for one short, funny movie to undertake. That it maintains a loose, almost shambling pace and an unpretentious air while doing so makes it all the more attractive. Smartness casually displayed is not something you find much at the movies these days.