Not really a horror movie, per se, but a family comedy that revolves around B-horror movies. John Goodman plays a William Castle-like horror filmmaker who is premiering his new movie Mant (half-man, half-ant!) in Key West during the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Goodman has imagined Mant as a very interactive experience, with rumbling seats that can give the audience light shocks, pyrotechnics and a man wearing a Mant suit who wanders into the audience at certain points. The movie mostly revolves around the children who are going to see the movie. The film has a lot of problems. The kid characters are all pretty uninteresting, and the main plot of the film, which is about Simon Fenton, a horror fan, missing his father, who is in the military on a boat outside of Cuba, reeks of grade C Spielberg. And the screenwriters figure that they can't have a movie where people are just sitting around watching another movie, so there are a whole bunch of subplots where the kids wander off during the movie to do other stuff. Ironically, the parts where we're watching Mant are by far the best part of the movie. I've heard so much about how good this was for years, and been wanting to see it forever (it was out of print on DVD for years), so I have to say it's a pretty big disappointment. Still, I think it's an okay movie.
