Kevin Smith’s The 4:30 Movie

Cody takes in a viewing of the latest Kevin Smith movie.

When writer/director/podcaster/etc. Kevin Smith was growing up, the Atlantic Moviehouse in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey was his local theatre, a place he spent many hours of his youth in, watching movies with family and friends. In 2022, he bought the theatre and renamed it SModcastle Cinemas (SMod has been part of his branding since he launched his SModcast podcast in 2007; his production company is called SModCo)... and, of course, once he had full access to a movie theatre, he started plotting a movie that could be primarily filmed within the theatre. This idea worked out exceptionally well, because the resulting film has turned out to be, as far as I’m concerned, one of the best movies Kevin Smith has ever made. And that’s coming from someone who has been a Smith devotee ever since I saw his feature debut Clerks at the age of 11 back in 1995; someone who considers Smith to be the top entertainer of my life.

The new movie is called The 4:30 Movie – and if you’ve been following Smith for as long as I have, that’s a title you’ve heard before. Smith has been dropping that name since long before he took ownership of the Atlantic Moviehouse. From 1968 to 1981, the New York-based TV station WABC aired movies every day of the week at 4:30; it was a program that was appropriately called The 4:30 Movie. A program that Smith, who was born in 1970, watched regularly during his formative years in New Jersey. At a previous point in his life, Smith was planning to make a movie called The 4:30 Movie that would have been a tribute to the kind of movies he saw on WABC back in the day (pulling this entirely from potentially faulty memory, I think the idea was that it would be an anthology, with Smith directing one story and his friend and fellow filmmaker Vincent Pereira directing another – with one story being something along the lines of either “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” or a post-apocalyptic rivalry between the deaf and the blind), but the movie with that title ended up being something very different.

Smith was 16 in 1986, the year The 4:30 Movie takes place in, and Austin Zajur stars in the film as 16-year-old Brian David, who is clearly a version of Smith himself (and Brian David happens to be the name his parents had originally picked out for him). He’s a Starlog-reading, obsessive movie fan who spends his days hanging out with his best friends Burny (Nicholas Cirillo) and Belly (Reed Northrup), much like young Smith was a Starlog-reading, obsessive movie fan who spent his days hanging out with his best friends Ernie and Belly. The trio of friends have decided to spend this particular day at the local movie theatre, where they’ll be paying to watch the kid-friendly sci-fi adventure film Astro Blaster and the Beaver-Men (a Flash Gordon riff) and then sneaking in to watch the R-rated comedies Dental School (which was referenced in Clerks) and Bucklick, which appears to be a play on Fletch. But this isn’t just going to be a guys’ day out, because Brian David has invited his crush Melody Barnegat (Siena Agudong) to accompany them to the 4:30 showing of Bucklick.

It’s a lot of fun to watch Brian David, Burny, and Belly interact as they make their way through their day, which does not go as smoothly as they expected. (Tragically, they don’t get to see all of the movies they had planned to see.) They banter in the way Smith’s characters tend to and are, as usual, preoccupied with sex, but the profanity is dialed down because Smith was aiming for a PG-13... even though the dialogue is still rough enough at times that the movie ended up with an R rating anyway. They’re also surrounded by entertaining supporting characters that are played by the likes of Rachel Dratch and Jason Lee (in a quick appearance as Brian David’s parents), Justin Long (as an oddball who has a hilarious discussion with Brian David about Rocky IV), Sam Richardson (as professional wrestler Major Murder), Betty Aberlin (as Belly’s mom, who provides him with mayo-slathered bacon as a movie-going snack), Ken Jeong (as the theatre’s high-strung manager), Adam Pally (as an unpleasant usher), and Genesis Rodriguez (as the “hot usher” who wants to direct, which is something she reveals during a great scene).

Even though Smith was working with Miramax and Dimension at the time Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino made Grindhouse, and he’s friends with Rodriguez and Tarantino, he wasn’t one of the filmmakers who was asked to contribute a faux trailer to that movie. (The fake trailers there were directed by Rodriguez, Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, and Edgar Wright.) Smith makes up for that oversight here, as we not only see glimpses of the fake movie Astro Blaster and the Beaver-Men (featuring characters played by Logic and Diedrich Bader), but also a trio of faux trailers: one for the vigilante nun prostitute movie Sister Sugar Walls (starring Harley Quinn Smith), a slasher called The Health Nut, and the Ghoulies-esque horror movie Booties, with Jason Biggs as a construction worker who has a bad experience in a port-a-potty. The Health Nut trailer also paves the way for my personal favorite exchange in the movie, where Brian David asks horror fan Burny, “Who wins in a fight between Jason, Freddy, Leatherface, and Michael Myers?” Burny answers, “My man Jason Voorhees.” Which is a great answer, because my man Jason would also be my pick. But Brian David says the correct answer is, “The audience. We all win.” Which, if such a movie were to be made, would be true.

The 4:30 Movie has funny lines and scenarios, it has cool faux trailers and a faux movie, and it also has a whole lot of the most important ingredient, the thing that has made me such a devoted Kevin Smith fan for decades: heart. The movie is a love letter to the movie-going experience, to the ‘80s, to the relationships we have with childhood friends, and it’s also a sweet little love story. Brian David shares a lot more scenes with Burny and Belly than he does with Melody, but when we do see Brian David and Melody together, it’s nice and charming to watch their relationship develop.

Like Smith, I have spent a whole lot of time in movie theatres. Like Brian David, Burny, and Belly, I have spent entire days watching movies in the theatre, moving from screen to screen (although I always paid for a ticket to every one). So this is a movie I could strongly relate to... and the viewing experience was made even better by the fact that watching this took me back to the early years of Smith’s career, when I was falling in love with his work through the likes of Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy. Even though he has brought his classic characters back to the screen in recent films (Jay and Silent Bob Reboot and Clerks III), this movie – which doesn’t have any returning characters, but does show a familiar location or two – is the one that has the strongest “early Smith” vibe to it, and it was great to get wrapped up in that again. I have enjoyed Smith’s career the entire time, from the start, through the wild and experimental days, through the stoner days, and this is one of his movies that I have enjoyed the most.

I love The 4:30 Movie.