INTERVIEW: Giallo-inspired ‘Last Matinee’ starring Ricardo Islas available now on DVD
Photo: The Last Matinee stars Ricardo Islas as the man in the coat with the knife. It’s a horror movie, after all. Photo courtesy of Dark Star Pictures & Bloody Disgusting / Provided by KWPR with permission.
The new horror movie The Last Matinee is now playing in theaters and also available on DVD and VOD, courtesy of Dark Star Pictures and Bloody Disgusting. The feature film, written and directed by Maxi Contenti, is inspired by the Italian giallo genre, meaning there’s a lot of blood and guts that get thrown around. Audience members beware.
The movie is something of a meta-horror film, taking place in a movie theater while a horror film is actually playing on the big screen (think Lamberto Bava’s Demons). The villain, played by Ricardo Islas, runs rampant, and the only person who seemingly can save the day is the projectionist’s daughter, according to press notes.
“It was not a tough decision to make, I can tell you that much, because when [Contenti] sent me the story and I read it, I realized right away that it was really a love letter to giallo and slasher combined,” Islas said in a recent phone interview. “Giallo is one of my favorite genres from the ‘60s and ‘70s, and for me to be in it was almost a dream come true. And on top of that to be the villain, to be the killer, I couldn’t ask for more.”
For the creative team behind The Last Matinee, the influences are clearly the Italian horror movies from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s — titles like Dario Argento’s The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. For Islas, his inspirations date further back. He looked at pictures from a lost Lon Chaney Sr. movie called London After Midnight, where the iconic horror actor placed pieces of wire inside his eyelids for full grotesque effect.
“I studied all those pictures and his performance in other movies,” he said. “For this kind of villain, and for this character in particular, since I was playing a killer that takes off his mask very early in the movie — I mean, there’s no mask, but I mean you can see him very early in the movie — and then he doesn’t get to talk, I realized that I had to resort to that very visual acting that many actors I know they don’t do it anymore. But I decided to give it a try, and I think it worked.”
Islas said he trained his muscles and facial expressions to be as villainous as possible. This is kind of a Michael Myers-type killer, so there is no dialogue coming from the bad man. Instead, he stalks and stabs, meaning it’s a purely visual performance.
“So no there was not a lot of mental preparation for it,” said Islas, who is known for El Que No Corre Vuela and Bailiwick. “There was a lot of physical preparation for it.”
The movie was shot in Uruguay, and Islas came to the set three weeks into a five-week shoot. That means the rest of the company members, including Luciana Grasso, Julieta Spinelli, Franco Duran and Pedro Duarte, already knew one another and how the movie was turning out. Islas was the newcomer, the outsider, and that actually fit his role quite well. Still, they embraced him once he arrived.
“It was such a wonderful group of people,” he said. “And I felt so welcome. When I came to the set, they had already been shooting for about three weeks. I came to the last two weeks, since I live in Chicago, and the movie was shot in Uruguay. But they immediately — I’m talking about immediately, from the moment I went through the door — they made me feel so well.”
Islas added: “In Uruguay, there is no horror tradition or industry, with very, very few exceptions, and this was one of them. This was probably one of the higher-caliber productions in the horror genre to ever be made in Uruguay, so for them, for the cast, it was an adventure. Also, if you ask Maxi, adventure is a word that comes to him many times when he is describing this project. For me, I was the velociraptor chasing the kids in Jurassic Park. To some extent, I tried to keep it physical for that reason, too, so that it would work like a roller coaster instead of being too brainy about it.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Last Matinee, starring Ricardo Islas, is now playing in theaters and available on DVD and VOD. Click here for more information.
