In his Philosopical investigations (1953) Ludwig Wittgenstein states that “deepness stands inside shallowness”. That is certainly true for Joe Dante’s cinema. But don’t take this as an offense. It’s quite the contrary. In Dante’s movies every important thing floats on the surface, you don’t need to excavate to reach it. The evil, the irrationality and the contradictions that lurk at the heart of American society are clearly expressed in all of his works. TV products included. It doesn’t matter whether the main character is an hungry killer fish rather than a werewolf, a little green monster, a galaxy explorer, some shady neighbour, a patrol of rogue toy soldiers or a director of improbable z-movies: underneath it all, the themes are always the same.

Dante’s cinema is all about recycling, in a postmodern sense. As the American director himself has said, “I love to pick up images that I like to insert them into a different perspective, even if I don’t know if that’s caused by an effort to prevent their disappearance or by the will to breed a new generation of things I can love”. In fact Dante’s cinema is most of all a “memorial” cinema, a cinema which is imbued in eternal adolescence, which feeds on the pop culture of the ’50s and which, as Franco La Polla says, stands right in the middle of the thin border that separates the past from the present. Dante recovers the myths that ruled the ‘50s and the ’60s and adapts them to the contemporary taste without sacrificing their original nature, as a movie like Matinée clearly demonstrates.
But his is also a cinema of fear, in which dreams and nightmares live peacefully side by side because “in the cultural frame of Joe Dante everything is linked to everything. And everything is a consequence of everything” (Franco La Polla). And it’s a playful cinema, too, good for having fun like a teenager at a drive-in on a Saturday night.