The Last Matinee



AKA: Al morir la matinée

An unnamed man sits outside a less than sheik movie complex sometime in 1993. He munches on some olives, puts on a pair of black gloves, and then proceeds to go inside where he systematically starts to kill a group of moviegoers in a near empty theater – including a couple on a date, three teens, a gal who was stood up by her date, an old man, and a young boy who snuck in – as they watch a horror movie titled Frankenstein: Day of the Beast. The crazed killer manages to lock the theater and knock off several people before anybody notices, leaving only the film projector and a couple of survivors to fend for themselves and figure out how to call for help and stop the fiend before it’s too late.



The Last Matinee is an international co-production between Uruguay, Mexico and Argentina from 2020. To give you an idea of what the film is like, director Maximiliano Contenti said that he wanted the film to pay tribute to both Italian giallo films and American slasher films. And I think he did a fairly good job of hitting that vibe. Meaning the film is most definitely a slasher at its core, with a super creepy killer and a lot of stabby-Mc-stabbin’ going on. But there’s also the mystery of not knowing who the killer is, or what his motives are, as well as a strong sense and focus on color and a variety of camera angles. It’s not enough to make the film feel all ‘arty-farty’, but it does add a strong sense of style to a production, whose plot could very otherwise be considered pretty ho-hum.



If you’re a fan of slashers, then I’d wager a guess that you’d probably walk away liking this one. There’s a decent variety of deaths and levels of violence on display, in the vein of a lot of brutal stabbings, slashings and head bashings that get worse as the film goes along. There’s nothing necessarily too unique here as far as slashers go, but it’s all very splattery and the gore is well done. So everything looks especially slick, to the point you can tell they spent a decent amount of time planning out the scenes. There’s even a decent level of added tension, too. Couple that with the ooey-gooey bits and you’ve got all the parts needed for a decent slasher flick.



It also helps that the film looks very nice. The lighting is dynamic, colors pop, you can see everything happening in the dark (thank you, movie), and there are a variety of creative angles used to help hold your interest. It may not rank up there with the most artistic horror films ever made, but the clear focus on the visuals does add a lot of appreciated panache to the entire production.





The film’s one downside is that it takes its sweet-ass time to really get started. The first quarter of the film is dedicated to introducing the entire cast of characters, a good 15 people in total if you include the brief intro of the killer. That’s…a lot. And a couple of them barely even hang around, so it can feel like a bit much. But by god, the movie wants you to know all about these random people who are watching this random horror movie before they get off-d. I mean, you don’t learn their entire backstories or anything, but you learn which ones are dorks, and which ones are assholes, and which ones are most willing to eat food off the floor, and above all you learn more about their sexual proclivities than you’d ever really want or need to know. And while a couple of them get whacked relatively early on, it’s really not until the movie’s halfway point where the pacing really starts to pick up. So you kinda have to be patient as the movie sorta chug-a-lugs its way up to cruising speed.



As good as the movie is, there are only two odd points of note (beyond the eclectic mix of various character tropes and idiosyncrasies). The first is the film’s focus on the movie-within-a-movie, Frankenstein: Day of the Beast. I’m sure part of the reason for this is that the director of that film (and yes, it is a real film made in 2011), Ricardo Islas, plays the killer in this film. But still, the move’s focus on it feels a bit excessive. I mean, I almost know just about as much of what’s going on in that movie as I know what was going on in this movie. So they could have maybe dialed that back just a tish.



And the second thing is the killer here is just…weird. I mean, his motives are explained by the end, and they are super creepy, but just…why? And I’m not saying that the killer (or any slasher killer, really) necessarily has to have a motive. They don’t. In fact, it’s usually scarier when their motives are a complete mystery. But since they did kind of give him a motive, it would have been nice to know WTF that was all about. Like, I get it, he has a deeply disturbing obsession with eyeballs. But the closest thing we get to a “why” is seeing him pluck the last olive out of a pickle jar before he goes into the theater (so I’m pretty sure that jar was filled with pickle juice, eric undead), and if THAT was somehow related to his motive I can’t help but think that it just would have been far easier and less time consuming for him to just go to a grocery store and buy some more fragging olives. Because plucking out the eyes of multiple theater attendees just seems like a bit of an extreme overreaction to running out of your favorite snack food, is all.



So, um, yeah, I ended up liking The Last Matinee. It’s not a perfect slasher and it’s not all that scary, but it’s fun and it’s pretty and it has some lovely atmosphere. As long as you can get past the pacing issues, the subtitles, and the characters that sometimes feel like they’re leaning a bit too heavily into their respective ‘tropes’, then this one is a good watch for genre fans. It doesn’t do anything new, but it’s solid.

The Last Matinee is available on a variety of streaming services.

The Last Matinee is also available on DVD and Bluray.

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