Producers: Lucia Gaviglio Salkind, Alina Kaplan and Maximiliano Contenti   Director: Maxi Contenti   Screenplay: Maxi Contenti and Manuel Facal   Cast: Luciana Grasso, Ricardo Islas, Franco Durán, Julieta Spinelli, Bruno Salvatti, Vladimir Knazevs, Daiana Carigi, Patricia Porzio, Emanuel Sobre, Pedro Duarte, Lucas Fressero, Valeria Martinez, Yuly Aramburu, Hugo Blandamuro, Julio Troisi and Juan Carlos Lema   Distributor: Dark Sky Pictures/Bloody Disgusting

Grade: C

As a homage to slasher movies of the sixties and seventies, particularly the classic Italian gialli of filmmakers like Mario Bava and Dario Argento, Uruguayan writer-director Maxi Contenti’s “The Last Matinee” works fairly well.  But as a horror movie in the broader sense, it’s a fairly tame, sluggish affair, despite a few moments whose ickiness will cause you to blanch. 

The set-up is simple.  The final screening of the day at a Montevideo theatre on a rainy day in 1993 is a grisly black-and-white frightfest (the clips that will flash by on the screen are from Ricardo Islas’ 2011 flick “Frankenstein: Day of the Beast”).  As the crowd from the previous film—including a little boy (Lucas Fressero) who spills his bag of brightly-colored candy balls on the stairwell and his impatient mother (Valeria Martinez—file out, theatre manager Mauricio (Pedro Duarte) tries to clear the auditorium of malingerers, notably a surly old man (Julio Troisi) who refuses to leave; Mauricio doesn’t notice that Tómas (Franco Durán) is hiding under a seat to stay for the scary movie.

Meanwhile up in the projection booth student Ana (Luciana Grasso) has taken over the job of running the picture from her ill father, whom she sends home to rest.

A few other paying patrons soon enter.  The most notable are sultry Gabriela (Patricia Porzio) and uptight Horacio (Emanuel Sobre), a couple out on their first date; Anglea (Julieta Spinelli), Goni (Vladimir Knazevs) and Tea (Bruno Salvatti), three chatty teens whose rowdiness causes Troisi’s old man to stalk out in a huff; and Maite (Daiana Carigi), a girl who had caught Goni’s eye on the bus because he thinks she looks like Brooke Shields.

There’s one other attendee—a creepy hooded guy draped in a plastic raincoat, identified in the credits as the Eye Eater.  He proceeds to target the other audience members with the knives and other implements he carries along in a duffel bag while pausing occasionally to munch on one of the spherical delicacies he keeps immersed in a jar of liquid.  The last hour of the movie consists of his dispatch of a number of them in lurid fashion and the efforts of the few who remain alive to escape the blades as he grimly pursues them.

Contenti, with obvious affection for the genre he’s emulating, tries to recapture the lurid goofiness of the kills that Argento, for example (or Brian De Palma in his earlier films) staged, and some of the yuckier bits—a throat slashing that emphasizes the cigarette smoke leaking from the wound, the two-for-one puncture of a kissing couple, a closing scene that replicates the spilling of the young boy’s candy balls, but with different objects cascading down the steps—are conceptually clever.

But even the best of them are undercut by pacing so deliberate that it saps the sequences of intensity; in trying to prolong and amplify the suspense, Contenti, his cinematographer Benjamin Silva and editor Santiago Bednarik instead diminish it.  Nor can Hernan Gonzalez’s score do much to enhance the tension.

Much of the running-time, moreover, is eaten up by footage of the victims-to-be that does little to elevate the characters from cardboard level, especially since the performances are perfunctorily one-dimensional.  One might be tempted, like little Tómas, to put your fingers over your eyes, but not because, like him, you’re scared, but because you’re tired.  Certainly “The Last Matinee” comes nowhere near equaling the nerve-wracking impact of Peter Bogdanovich’s early “Targets,” starring Boris Karloff, which ends with a sniper at a drive-in movie.     

On the other hand, gialli aficionados will admire Christina Nigro’s garish production design, which makes the interior of the big old theatre—and even the boxoffice area outside—a character in itself, especially with all the allusions to the movies Contenti loves (like Argento’s “Opera”) on the walls.  They’ll also appreciate the fact that the killer is played by Islas, himself a maker of horror flicks (in fact, he directed the “Frankenstein” picture the audience is watching here).

But that simply emphasizes that “The Last Matinee” is a movie made for buffs by buffs.  If you fall into that category, you’ll enjoy it.  If not, probably not.