WELCOMING IN 2022

Well, last night I welcomed in the New Year by being really happy when I scrolled though the 557 channels and found that, for once, there was “something on.”

I watched “Matinee,” and I was really glad I did.

It’s directed by my fellow graduate of the Roger Corman Film School, Joe Dante. It’s a love letter to the movies he grew up on - as did many of us. When I saw it on opening night in 1993, it was in the biggest theater at the Burbank AMC 8, and the audience ranged from teenagers to people the age I am now, and at the end when the lights came up, everyone (nobody had left while the Dead Sea Scrolls were running) gave it a standing ovation. You don’t get that response often, maybe only once in your career - if then. When it happened for “Terror Within,” it meant it went on to be Roger’s biggest hit ever. I figured that was what was going to happen with “Matinee,” but it didn’t: the movie sank without a trace, despite the fact that over the years, every person I have met who saw it said they loved it. There just weren’t enough of them. I even talked once to the studio executive who said “Yes” and he said it was the easiest “Yes” he ever gave to a pitch. Further proof that, indeed, Nobody. Knows. Anything.

It stars John Goodman as William Castle. The character’s name in the movie is Lawrence Woolsey, but he’s really William Castle, a guy who really did all the things Lawrence Woolsey does: make incredibly bad horror movies on the cheap cheap cheap, come up with a gimmick (the most notable of which you get to see him setting up in the theater where he’s going to show his movie - “Mant!” half-human, half-ant, all horror! - which was known when Castle did it as the special effect that made “The Tingler” tingle.) and then take it on the road to a place like Key West, Florida, where he arrives the day after all the U.S. Navy ships based there have put to sea as part of the Cuban Missile Crisis to hold the movie’s world premiere.

It also stars Cathy Moriarty as Woolsey’s star and collaborator - a great actor who made far fewer movies than anyone would have expected after she knocked it out of the ballpark and into the next county in “Raging Bull.”

It turned out “Matinee” was the best possible movie to watch at the end of 2021, with which to welcome in 2022.

It takes place over the seven days that everyone alive then believed were likely the last days they would spend alive on earth - the American ships cruising off Cuba, the Russian freighters carrying the missiles not turning back as they steamed toward the confrontation that would End The World As We Know It. My cousin was on a submarine that left Key West to follow one of those freighters; they had orders to sink it without warning if it crossed the quarantine line - it really was the week Shit Got Real.

As Willaim Castle, er, Lawrence Woolsey, says to 14-year old Gene Loomis, whose father is on one of those destroyers at the quarantine line, it’s the perfect week to premiere “Mant!” Gene is a kid who grew up on “The Tingler” and all the other movies that got us through the nightmare of the 1950s and early 60s - he takes advantage of his discovery that his hero is in town, and becomes Woolsey’s willing student.

It’s the perfect week to premiere the movie exactly because everyone is thinking This Is The End, as Woolsey explains to Gene: “Why do people come see my movies? They come because they’re scared to death about what they’re reading in the papers. They come and get scared, and then the monster is killed, and everything’s OK, and they all feel so good they want to see it again.” That’s basically the plotline.

Yes. That is why people like horror movies. I remember Stephen King once telling how, when he got through with writing one of those “classic Stephen King moments” he would re-read it, and think to himself, “Yeah, that’ll get ‘em!”

Go watch “Matinee” yourself. It’s for rent at Amazon (updated info). It really is the perfect movie with which to welcome 2022. The audience was wrong in 1993 - “Matinee” has become a “cult classic,” and it did so because it’s the perfect movie with which to welcome 2022.

A very good writer I know who writes this kind of fiction very successfully, wrote in his blog this morning:

“This year, I'm resolving to find the joy in the work, and to embrace that joy the way a person in the ocean would cling to a piece of floating debris.

“It's like this:

“I think in the midst of the chaos, which is considerable, I am reminded that nothing is promised, nothing is guaranteed. We are owed nothing but what we owe ourselves, and it is exactly that compact, that contract, that I want to cleave to this year.

“Because what I owe myself is to find joy amidst that chaos.

“Which for me is about finding the joy in the work.

“Perhaps you owe yourself that, too.”

“The work” this year is whatever is there to be done that comes before us. The opportunity to strike a blow, any blow, against the darkness. To say in so doing that the odds of there being democracy in 2025 are better than a coin toss.

I try to remind myself whenever things are looking hard that “hard times” are what made us into Homo Sapiens in the first place. Our ancestors got pushed out of the trees onto the Serengeti Plain in the middle of a million year drought. Which they survived. And their descendants went out and discovered the world and populated it and discovered there was more to life than just what could be seen and touched, and they did it in the middle of a 100,000-year Ice Age.

And they told themselves stories. Like the one Lawrence Woolsey tells Gene, about how the cave man who survived an encounter with a woolly mammoth, came home and painted the mammoth on the cave wall, and gave it scary eyes and sharp teeth and big claws. And then they ate the monster that had bee killed after all, and all was well.

Yes. It’s scary out there. If you aren’t scared about what the future might hold, you have Missed The Memo. And yes, the monster does indeed appear to have very sharp teeth and really sharp claws. And it’s really big. And we’re really small.

And that is why the story of how we killed the monster is so popular.We survived. We will survive. We ate the monster.

And like the mom says at the end, “Are you gonna tell me my son can’t see the second screening, after he stood in line all this time?”

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