Matinee
In Key West, Florida in October 1962, boys Gene Loomis (Fenton) and his brother Dennis (Lee) live on a military base (N.A.S. Key West); their father is away on a nearby submarine. After hearing the announcement of an exclusive engagement of Lawrence Woolsey's (Goodman) new sensational horror film Mant! ("Half man! Half ant!" "in Atomo-Vision and Rumble-Rama!"), including Woolsey's appearance in-person, they arrive home to President Kennedy's television interruption, stating the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Woolsey finds this atmosphere of fear to be the perfect environment in which to open his atomic-radiation-themed film.
Woolsey brings along Herb Denning (Miller) and Bob (Sayles) to stir up the yokels by protesting the film, but Howard, the theatre manager (Picardo), assures him that "the people of Key West are not yokels." Indeed, the progressive Jack and Rhonda (Clennon and Butler) make a strong free speech argument for allowing the film to proceed.
New to the local high school, and not getting along with the similarly-aged Andy (Nick Bronson) on the base, Gene ends up associating with Stan (Katz), and becomes infatuated with Jack and Rhonda's daughter, Sandra (Jakub), after she takes a detention for protesting the uselessness of an air raid drill and yelling the truth of the false protection at the students in the hall. In attempting to get a date to the dance, Stan goes for Sherry (Martin), who was seeing a prison poet, Harvey Starkweather (Villemaire), who regularly bothers Stan about his interest in her (and hers in him).
The film is structured in halves: the first half leading up to the screening, and the second half depicting the screening and what goes on at and around it. The film also showed the differences in two young women who eventually become the girlfriends of the two boys. The girlfriend of Gene had progressive ideas of what a woman might become, whereas the eventual girlfriend of Stan was very much in line with what society at the time of the film's setting thought a young lady should be.
murder