In Piranha, thousands of tiny fish – already known for their carnivorous appetites – go bonkers for human flesh after being genetically modified by the government. Among the film’s stars are Barbara Steele, Kevin McCarthy, Bradford Dillman and Dick Miller.
Matinee has a William Castle-type of showman hawking his latest film, Mant!, about a half-man, half-ant beast. Look for McCarthy, Miller and Robert O. Cornthwaite.
And the cute little creatures in Gremlins come with the warning that you must never, ever feed them after midnight – or else.
Welcome to the sci-fi and horror B-movies of the 1950s – in spirit, that is, since Piranha was released in 1978, Gremlins in 1984 and Matinee in 1993. All are from talented filmmaker Joe Dante, whose more than 40-year career has the soul of classic sci-fi and horror, the very movies he watched as a kid.
“Those movies made us believe a tarantula was coming down the street,” Dante said, referencing the 1955 film “Tarantula” during one of his multiple appearances on the recent Turner Classic Movies Classic Cruise. On the cruise, he introduced a few of his films and sat for two insightful hour-long interviews with TCM hosts treating audiences to behind-the-scenes stories about his work, his lifelong passion for movies and his “film schooling” under Roger Corman.
But what really stuck with me was how his career was undeniably linked to those 1950s creature films he watched as a kid, and how one of his films, above all, is the “closest movie to me” – Matinee.
“I am the kid in the movie,” he says about the movie-loving teen at the heart of Matinee. “It’s very personal to me. It’s a movie about why I love movies.”
Originally about a haunted movie theater, Matinee morphed into a story about a film huckster (robustly played by John Goodman) that was set during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 – a very scary time for Dante as a teen.
“That was the weekend we didn’t know if we were going back to school,” Dante said. “The weekend we feared the world was going to end.”
Dante wanted the film to be a scrupulous re-creation of 1962 and that meant everything in the film had to look like it was state-of-the-art in 1962, not 1993 when Matinee was made. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the nostalgic and entertaining movie-within-a-movie, Mant!
“It was a tribute to all ‘50s sci-fi movies I saw as a kid,” Dante said about Mant! “And I saw a lot as a kid at the Saturday matinees.”
How many? Well, if you wanted to know where Joe Dante was as a kid, he said, you would be told “Dante’s at the movies.”
“It was my church. When the lights go down, you don’t know what you will see, but it will change your life,” he said.
Initially, Dante went to matinees to watch the cartoons – he had dreams of being a cartoonist – and didn’t like the movies that were being shown afterward. But it took only one film to change his mind.
“One day I stayed to see It Came from Outer Space – and thought ‘hmm, these movies with grown-ups can be pretty good,’ ” he shared.
“I became enamored with movies. I never thought I would make them,” Dante added. “But I did find making movies was what I was supposed to do.”
We can thank Roger Corman for helping him along the way.
The Corman effect
“If Roger Corman hadn’t hired me, I would not be sitting here and wouldn’t have a career – and I wasn’t the only one,” Dante said on the TCM Cruise, referring to the many filmmakers who learned the ropes by working with Corman including Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Ron Howard and James Cameron.
Corman had a talent for finding people who “really, really wanted to make movies and they were gonna make the best ‘Woman in Cages’ movie,” Dante laughed, referencing a string of women behind bars films made by Corman’s New World Pictures.
“The great thing about Roger Corman is that he would hire people with no experience in the movie business,” Dante said. “He didn’t like to pay a lot of money. He would get these kids and pay them nothing and I was one of those kids.”
Dante got his start creating trailers along with his friend Allan Arkush for Corman. The two made their first film when Corman took on a bet to make the cheapest film ever for New World Pictures. The film – and winner of the bet – was Hollywood Boulevard, co-directed by Dante and Arkush in 10 days for about $50,000. They used footage from previous Corman movies in their film about a B-movie studio called Miracle Pictures where “if it’s a good picture, it a miracle.” That economy was the cornerstone of Corman films.
“There are many obstacles to making a Roger Corman film,” Dante said. “And no matter what he would throw at you, you would find a way around it. And all of the things you learned working with Roger were things you would use working with people who had money, but none of them knew as much about films as Roger.”
When asked what Corman taught him, Dante quickly said “to make decisions.”
Piranha, Jaws and Spielberg
Two years after his co-directing work on Hollywood Boulevard, Dante made his solo directorial debut with Piranha, which he laughingly – but affectionately – called “another $1.98 special.”
It was also, he told the TCM audience, a film that would not have been released except for the help of another young filmmaker, Steven Spielberg.
Universal Studios was preparing to release Jaws 2, the sequel to Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster Jaws, and as happens in Hollywood, the copycats had been coming fast. To protect the box office for Jaws 2, Universal was doing what it could to block competition and that would include Piranha.
Universal was “was very, very unhappy to have an upstart Jaws” rip-off at the same time Jaws 2 was being released, Dante said.
Luckily for Dante, as he later learned, Spielberg stepped in. “He said ‘you guys don’t get it – it’s a spoof not a rip-off.’ … Well of course it was a rip-off,” Dante laughed to the delight of the audience.
And Dante knew that while he was making Piranha. “We had a character play a Jaws game just to say, ‘we know it’s a Jaws rip-off,’ ” Dante said.
What set it apart from the other Jaws rip-offs was the writing.
“The secret is to have a great writer,” Dante said. “The characters are good, and the movie was much better than the Jaws rip-off it was intended to be.”
More from Joe Dante
I have notebooks filled with what Dante shared during the TCM Classic Cruise and, as a classic horror fan, I couldn’t get enough. His stories were entertaining, funny, sometimes bittersweet and always genuine.
My story was how the karo syrup used for blood in Piranha created a fungus – a new life, environmental experts told the filmmakers – that had to be exterminated. Dante seemed proud as he shared that tale and I thought it would make a perfect plot for one of films.
Here are just a few more.
On his early days making movie trailers for Roger Corman: “I made it my crusade that if I knew a scene was being cut out of a film, I would put it in [the trailer] for posterity.”
Watching a movie in theaters: “What a communal joy it is to experience that kind of entertainment. It’s why we’re still here, why we still do this. We just love seeing movies and seeing movies with an audience is the cream of the crop.”
On Targets, the directorial debut of Peter Bogdanovich: “It is one of the best first movies by a director.”
On Turner Classic Movies: “The gift that has been given to us by TCM …. The one place you know you can see a movie the way it’s supposed to look is TCM. It’s such a gem and people need to appreciate it.”
On the movie theater scene when the film broke in Gremlins: “Projectionists hated me. If you didn’t tell them right away, they thought the film really broke.”
On Gremlins: “Warner Brothers didn’t like the project but OK’d it because he (Steven Spielberg) wanted to do it. The script was very violent; at its heart, it was a horror movie.
On his Trailers from Hell web series: “It’s always rewarding to me when people say I saw a trailer on your site and it led me to watch the movie and now I’m a big fan of the director. I feel like I’m giving back.”
Dante approved films
Dante has often talked about his favorite classic horror films. Here are 10:
Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). Roger Corman directs film about telepathic giant crabs.
Black Sabbath (1963). Mario Bava horror anthology hosted by Boris Karloff.
Black Sunday (1960). Bava’s “official” directorial debut stars Barbara Steele in two roles.
Cry of the Werewolf (1944). A young Nina Foch is a gypsy suffers from a family curse.
Macabre (1958). Showman William Castle – an inspiration in Dante’s Matinee – gave moviegoers a $10,000 insurance policy in case they died while watching his film.
Die, Monster, Die! (1965). Karloff stars in loose adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft story.
This Island Earth (1955). Jack Arnold had a hand in co-directing this tale of atomic scientists unwittingly brought together to help visitors from another planet.
The Return of the Vampire (1943). Bela Lugosi stars as a vampire not named Dracula in film from Columbia Pictures.
Target Earth (1954). Richard Denning is one of a small group of survivors in a deserted city during an alien robot invasion.
Tarantula (1955). Jack Arnold directs one of the great B-movies about a giant tarantula terrorizing a desert town.
More on the TCM Classic Cruise
To read more about the TCM Cruise and other guests, here’s the link to another story I wrote.
– Toni Ruberto for Classic Movie Hub
You can read all of Toni’s Monsters and Matinees articles here.
Toni Ruberto, born and raised in Buffalo, N.Y., is an editor and writer at The Buffalo News. She shares her love for classic movies in her blog, Watching Forever and is a member and board chair of the Classic Movie Blog Association. Toni was the president of the former Buffalo chapter of TCM Backlot and led the offshoot group, Buffalo Classic Movie Buffs. She is proud to have put Buffalo and its glorious old movie palaces in the spotlight as the inaugural winner of the TCM in Your Hometown contest. You can find Toni on Twitter at @toniruberto and on Bluesky at @Watchingforever.bsky.social.
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