Joe Dante

Joe Dante (born November 28 1946 in Morristown, New Jersey) is an American film director and producer, who is noted for his "twisted" humor. His films include Piranha (1978) and The Howling (1981), both from scripts by John Sayles; Gremlins (1984), his first major hit, and its sequel ' (1990); Innerspace (1987) and Amazon Women on the Moon (1987).

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Dante's films are notable for their cinematic in-jokes, which can be endearing or irritating depending on the quality of the film. In the werewolf film The Howling, for example, many of the characters are named after directors of other werewolf films. In Gremlins, which was produced by Steven Spielberg, a cinema is showing Watch the Skies (a famous line from Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World) and A Boy's Life, which were working titles for Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and E.T., respectively.

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Dante's other films include Explorers (1987), in which three boys build a spacecraft and encounter gloriously ugly aliens who communicate entirely in lines and catch-phrases picked up from watching Earth's television signals; and Small Soldiers (1998), featuring Kirsten Dunst, in which a highly advanced artificial intelligence is implanted into a set of action figures. His love of creaky science fiction and horror films is put to good use in Matinee (1993), set during the Cuban missile crisis. Besides some truly black satire on attitudes to the prospect of nuclear war, Matinee features a character (based on William Castle and played by John Goodman) who directs cheap schlock sci-fi horror movies and markets them with endearing chutzpah.

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1946: 1946 was a common year starting on Tuesday. (see link for calendar)...

Morristown: Morristown (also spelt Morice Town) is a part of Devonport in England that has now been subsumed within the city of Plymouth....

New Jersey: New Jersey is the fifth smallest but most densely populated state of the United States of America; the U.S. postal abbreviation is NJ. The state is named after the island of Jersey in the English Channel....

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