Although not specifically about Castle himself, “Matinee” is concerned with a Castle-like filmmaker/shown named Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman), a garrulous schlock movie producer who, as the film opens, is heading down to Key West. He’s traveling with his long-suffering girlfriend/star, Ruth Corday (Cathy Moriarity), to present a preview of his latest effort, “Mant!,” a suitably loopy knockoff of “The Fly” in which a man is transformed into a radioactive half-man/half-ant mutation after being bitten by an ant while getting a dental X-ray. (On the bright side, the sheepish dentist points out, no cavities.) However, Woolsey’s arrival in town happens to coincide with the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis, an event that has the town especially on edge since most of the men at the local naval base have been shipped to take part in the naval blockade occurring frighteningly close to their own back yards. Some suggest to Woolsey that it might be a good idea for him to postpone the preview, out of good taste if nothing else. Woolsey refuses to do so, stating that horror movies tend to do well in tense times, and sets about promoting “Mant!” around town by any means necessary—including hiring a couple of guys (John Sayles and B-movie icon Dick Miller) to stage a phony protest meant to call more attention to the movie—while setting up the theater for all the gimmicks (many of which will be familiar to students of Castle) that will be deployed, including the miracles of “Atom-O Scope” and “Rumble-Rama.” One person eagerly awaiting the “Mant!” premiere is Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), who lives on the naval base with his mother (Lucinda Jenny) and younger brother, Dennis (Jesse Lee), and whose father has just been sent out to take part in the blockade. One day, Gene meets Woolsey himself and tells him that those “protesters” aren’t who they seem to be and Woolsey, both taken with this kid and wanting to keep a lid on his ruse, takes Gene under his wing to offer him a crash course in the fine art of hucksterism.

Finally, the day of the preview arrives, and Gene and Dennis show up with Gene’s new friend Stan (Omri Katz) for the festivities even as the rest of the world is bracing itself for a possible nuclear showdown. Also at the theatre are a couple of female classmates who are perhaps the only thing that could distract a pair of teenage boys from the likes of “Mant!” Gene finds himself attracted to Sandra (Lisa Jakub), a budding firebrand (whom Gene first saw as she was getting detention for interrupting a duck-and-cover nuclear attack drill by pointing out how useless it was) who is there with her parents, the town’s local liberals who have been suckered into seeing the film as a free speech issue. For Stan, things are a little more complicated. Attracted to classmate Sherry (Kelli Martin), he's there after having broken a date with her after being threatened by her ex-boyfriend, a failed hood and would-be beat poet. When she turns up as well, it goes bad for a while but soon they make up and begin making out in the audience. Unfortunately, the ex-boyfriend, whose last name—Starkweather—is a direct reference to another terror from around that time, has been hired by Woolsey to dress up in a Mant outfit and terrorize the audience at key moments and when he sees the two of them, his rage touches off a chain of events that livens up the preview to the point where the screening literally brings the house down.

Virtually all of Joe Dante’s movies have served to one degree or another as tributes to pop culture, especially the genre films that he himself grew up watching as a kid. “Matinee” is different in that while most of his projects up to that point had been movies that were themselves about movies and the people who watched them—“The Howling,” for example, was a funny and scary, meta-werewolf movie—in which the characters already knew all the werewolf lore from having seen things like “The Wolf Man” and acted accordingly. “Matinee,” on the other hand, was the first time that he had set a film in a real and specific time and place and observed the real-world ways in which the lives of the characters were shaped and affected by the films they saw, the music they listened to and the magazines that they read (and sometimes needed to keep out of sight from their mothers). A kid like Gene, for example, is at the age where he is young enough for most adults to still treat him like a kid but old enough to know that things are not as rosy and idealistic as people want him to believe. At home, his mother does her best to reassure him and Dennis that everything is okay with their father but the worried look on her face every time the television breaks in with news of the missile crisis says otherwise. The brief glimpses we get of his school life also show the kids being “taught” any number of dubious lessons, ranging from the nuclear attack drill to a “nutrition” lesson that essentially recommends the daily consumption of an entire stockyard.