Love Joe Dante as well and would agree with MichaelB about the way his films seem to be respecting their material rather than looking down on it - Matinee is a great example as Goodman's movie producer unwittingly goes too far in adding nuclear bomb material into his film (premiered in Florida, no less!) at the height of the Cuban missile crisis! The sequence of the film within the film melting, turning to colour and showing the mushroom cloud supposedly behind the screen, takes the William Castle style of experiential terror to new heights while still retaining some connection to his real gimmicks. The great thing is that scene also ties in with the lead character's nuclear nightmare from near to the beginning of the film and shows how films can have the power of pulling our semi-conscious fears out of our heads and putting them on screen in a safe context for audiences to try and deal with. Exploitation cinema in the best sense. So it is not just to pay homage to a film director's shock tactics but actually has an important part to play in the story as well. I could imagine a kid having nuclear nightmares could become a lifelong film fan at seeing the power a film could have in representing a possible nightmare scenario - to know that he is not the only person feeling nervous about what could occur.
It seems that catharsis is a major theme of all Dante's films yet always leavened, not undercut, by black humour. I remember being traumatised by the dark haired camp counsellor being the only person to die in the piranha attack on the school summer camp (why couldn't it have been the blonde one? Or the completely unsympathetic male counsellor, insistent on forcing the kids into the water? I remember finding that whole scene more shocking than any in Jaws and even looking back I still think the whole set up of making one of the counsellors extremely sympathetic only to have her be the one killed off was a simple trick masterfully done), but then there's also the fate of both the spunky female characters in The Howling; Phoebe Cate's comic/tragic Santa story in Gremlins; Tom Hanks making himself a pariah until the very last moment in The Burbs; the discussions of death, loss of innocence, war and racism in (I agree, very underrated) Small Soldiers.
And nothing could be more cathartic than seeing a complacent, superior and mocking Dick Cheyney substitute misjudging a situation and having his head smashed to a pulp against a table by one of the soldiers he sent off to die in Homecoming!
But then there's the comic touches: "Go out there and distract the guard" "What if he's gay?" "Then I'll distract him!"; the cutest, most loveable werewolf I've ever seen; everything about the Gremlins films, even the deaths (love the malfunctioning stair lift!); the way that Homecoming is told from a Republican spin-doctor perspective, so as things spiral out of control the absurdity of the character's take on events becomes comically ludicrous; and so on.
I also remember enjoying Eerie, Indiana - the episode involving the woman who had a scarily intense fixation on the preservative powers of tupperware (to the extent of sealing her children in the plastic boxes at night to keep them 'fresh'!) was particularly memorable, with all her efforts at pushing the little plastic tubs to the neighbourhood housewifes in front room gatherings observed by the frightened kids coming across as part Invasion of the Body Snatchers and partly like a coven from Rosemary's Baby!
I think he is great at making children's films without cloying sentimentality, showing the strangeness and sometimes horror of the strange rituals of the adult world through characters in transition from childhood and still able to see the magic, strangeness and absurdity of everyday life.
I've not seen the TV movie The Second Civil War yet but keep hearing good things about that too. I wouldn't class the Looney Tunes film (except for the Louvre sequence already mentioned) or even Homecoming as classic Joe Dante but I hope he gets the chance to return to feature film making some time soon.
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