"The Last Matinee" a vicious slasher pic with giallo style coming out of the eyeballs

The Last Matinee (2021)

In the lurid, gruesome Uruguay-Argentinian slasher throwback “The Last Matinee,” the stabbings and blood-dripping are coming from inside the movie theater, and not just the horror movie being projected. Director Maximiliano Contenti doesn’t have much more than an elemental script (from writer Manuel Facal) to work with, but he brings enough giallo style (including a one-sheet of Dario Argento’s “Opera” in the lobby) and practical gore effects to scratch a horror fan’s itch. “The Last Matinee” looks great with the retro feel of any slasher pic, and being called “Red Screening” in other regions, you bet it delivers the red stuff.

As far as story is concerned, all you really need to know is that a slimy, hooded, leather glove-wearing psycho killer enters a local movie theater in 1993 on a rainy evening in Montevideo, Uruguay, and kills off the staff and customers. OK, so he kills and then collects their eyeballs in a pickle jar. Our protagonist is college student Ana (Luciana Grasso), the daughter of the theater owner and projectionist. She’s doing her ailing father a favor by filling in for him to work the late shift and uses this time to study for an exam. Among the ticket-holding patrons in the theater are a homeless man, a trio of drinking teens, a sneaky young boy, and an odd couple on a date (or is the indifferent girlfriend who goes between stretching her chewing gum to lighting up a cigarette in the theater a sex worker?). Will any of them be left alive to enjoy the show? 

Director Contenti does let the film take time to warm up, setting up different character types before killing a lot of them off. There is no cut-and-dry motive for this psychopath, except, maybe, he just likes what he does, and he believes in equal-opportunity killing. This killer does not discriminate by age or gender, so don’t get attached to everyone, that’s for sure. The victims-to-be are fallible, as they always should be, making silly mistakes (one hit on the killer’s head with a fire extinguisher might not cut it) but still able to defend themselves with the resources around them. Being projected on the screen is “Frankenstein: Day of the Beast,” a schlocky 2011 horror indie that was, in fact, made by Ricardo Islas, the actor playing the killer credited as “The Eye-Eater” (squish). It’s too bad the film within the film isn’t an actual slasher film to enrich the meta nature, like that unforgettable opening in “Scream 2” and “He Knows You’re Alone,” or the entirety of “Popcorn," but as a trade-off, we do get some beautifully photographed violence.

“The Last Matinee” is effective in what it seeks to do, which is be a vicious slasher with a twisted sense of humor and style coming out of its eyeballs. It begins with gumballs bouncing down a theater staircase and ends with eyeballs bouncing down those same set of stairs. A smoker has his throat slashed, the smoke blowing out of his neck, and a couple gets skewered like a shish kebab while making out. If any of that sounds like your bag of popcorn, it’s fun in a gross, nasty, dangerous, eyeball-munching sort of way. You will never touch a pickle jar again.

Grade: B -

Dark Star Pictures and Bloody Disgusting released “The Last Matinee” (88 min.) in select theaters on August 6, 2021, followed by a VOD, Digital and DVD release on August 24, 2021.