YMMV / Matinee

• Base-Breaking Character: Sherry is either one of the best teen characters in the movie and a source of good comic relief and Character Development, or a generic character with a potentially manipulative attitude, depending on who you ask.
• Cult Classic: Doesn't get the same amount of love that other Joe Dante movies get, but the niche fan base it has still adores it beyond believe and thinks it's highly underrated.
• Dancing Bear: Lawrence Woolsey's movies (an in-work reference to the Funhouse Horror films of William Castle).
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Robert Picardo talking to a man named "Woolsey."
  • Sherry won't be the last bad boy-loving teenaged girl in a Joe Dante movie who gets caught up in a wild series of events due to her little brother's taste for violent entertainment.
  • Seven years later, Lucinda Jenney (who plays Gene's mother) would appear in another movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
• Jerkass Woobie: Andy loses some likability due to his enthusiasm for shooting frogs and jingoism, but the blatant way everyone treats him like The Friend Nobody Likes when he desperately wants to befriend them can feel pitiable.
• Retroactive Recognition: In one of her first roles, Naomi Watts plays one of the stars of the film-within-a-film The Shook-Up Shopping Cart.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The screening of the Show Within a Show B-Movie is one of the most important, humorous, and iconic parts of the movie, but it only takes up the last third or so of the movie.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Herb and Bob vanish from the film after recruiting Harvey to work at the premiere. If they had attended the event themselves during the third act (they don't), they could have had some good comic scenes pretending to still protest the film and trying to rein in Harvey's incompetence and disloyalty. Their being on the Hollywood blacklist is also only casually mentioned, with no exploration into the characters' views on the it and any risks Woolsey faces for ignoring it.
• Why Would Anyone Take Him Back?: Starkweather seems bent on stalking Sherry after sending her beat poetry from juvenile detention, and she isn't completely over him for most of the film. When Starkweather delivers an awful poem as he's holding Sherry hostage, Woolsey even asks what Sherry sees in him.

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