DANTE, Joe

(1947-)

   US film-maker. Originally a fan writer, JD entered the film industry working for Roger CORMAN's New World in the trailers department, making Filipino movies look more exciting by inserting stock shots of exploding helicopters. His first feature, codirected with Allan Arkush, was Hollywood Boulevard (1976), a brisk and breezy SATIRE on low-budget schlock movies featuring many cameo roles, ranging from Dick Miller to Godzilla (GOJIRA), inaugurating JD's tradition of movie-buff in-jokes.With writer John SAYLES, JD made PIRANHA (1978) and The Howling (1981), a pair of effective MONSTER MOVIES with amusing satirical twists (the latter not really sf), and then he gravitated into the orbit of Steven SPIELBERG to direct an episode of Twilight Zone: The Movie (adapted from "It's a Good Life" [1953] by Jerome BIXBY) and more famously Gremlins (1984), a nasty anecdote in which anarchic monsters chew away at the foundations of a Spielberg-cum-Capra small town.Following the box-office disappointment of his most personal film, EXPLORERS (1985), a meditation on the SENSE OF WONDER informed by the cultural legacy of Forrest J. ACKERMAN, JD has had less independent control, but has nevertheless delivered a lively, self-aware run of comedies with an edge: INNERSPACE (1987) is a feature-length parody of FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966), The 'burbs (1989) a psychotic neighbourhood comedy, and Gremlins II: The New Batch (1990). JD has also contributed episodes to the omnibus film of sf skits, Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), and to the tv series AMAZING STORIES (1985-7), The TWILIGHT ZONE (2nd series, 1985-7) and Police Squad (1982). In 1991 JD became creative consultant for, and directed 5 episodes of, Eerie, Indiana (1991), an NBC tv series about a Tom-Sawyer-type kid and his sidekick who conduct supernatural investigations in a seemingly average but actually weird town. JD's next feature was the amusing MATINEE (1993), a coming-of-age film set in Key West, 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, in which much of the action is connected to a new sf exploitation movie premiering in town, "Mant", about a man who becomes a giant ant creature. Matinee is a kind of critique of early 1960s MONSTER MOVIES and their cultural background.

   KN/PN

   See also: CINEMA; FEMINISM; HORROR IN SF.