Tubi is still the best deal in streaming and it isn’t close. While Netflix and the rest keep raising prices and hollowing out their catalogs to fund whatever prestige project nobody asked for, Tubi stays free and keeps its shelves stocked with the kind of films that used to fill the walls of a good video rental store. Classics, cult favorites, cheesy genre pictures, hidden gems, and everything in between. Every week I pull three worth your Tuesday night from the catalog. This week we’ve got an all-time Western that belongs in any serious conversation about the best films of the 1990s, a 90s kid sports comedy that genuinely holds up, and a sword and sorcery hidden gem that Thalia has been whispering in my ear about.
Tombstone (1993)
Western/Action • 2h 10m
There are a handful of films where everything just clicks at exactly the right moment with exactly the right people, and Tombstone is one of them. Kurt Russell plays Wyatt Earp, a legendary lawman who has hung up his badge and moved to the booming mining town of Tombstone, Arizona with his brothers Virgil (Sam Elliott) and Morgan (Bill Paxton), hoping to make money and stay out of trouble. Trouble, naturally, finds them anyway in the form of the Cowboys, a ruthless outlaw gang led by the charismatic and completely unhinged Curly Bill Brocius (Powers Boothe) and his ice-cold lieutenant Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn). What follows is one of the best-constructed Western narratives ever put on screen, building steadily to the OK Corral and then paying off everything it set up with an extended third act that just keeps delivering. The film officially credits George P. Cosmatos as director, but it’s been well documented that Russell essentially ghost-directed it himself after original director Kevin Jarre was replaced early in production. Whatever the behind the scenes story, the result is flawless.
Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday is the reason people still quote this film thirty years later. It is one of the great supporting performances in the history of American cinema. Every line Kilmer delivers lands perfectly, from the playful menace of “I’m your huckleberry” to the devastating final conversation between Doc and Wyatt near the end. He is the heart and soul of the whole film and the reason it transcends a very good Western into something iconic. The rest of the cast, including Dana Delany, Billy Zane, Michael Rooker, Jason Priestley, and a brief Charlton Heston appearance, fills out a world that feels completely alive. Tombstone is free on Tubi right now and if you haven’t seen it in a while, you owe yourself a rewatch.
Little Giants (1994)
Comedy/Family • 1h 47m
This one hits different when you grew up watching it. Rick Moranis plays Danny O’Shea, the overlooked younger brother of Kevin (Ed O’Neill), a former NFL star whose name is literally on the town water tower. When Kevin cuts Danny’s daughter Becky (Shawna Waldron), a talented tomboy nicknamed Icebox, from the local Pee-Wee football team for being a girl, Danny decides to form his own rival squad out of every misfit kid who didn’t make the cut. The team they assemble is spectacular 90s comedy gold: a kid who can’t stop farting, a quarterback with a rocket arm and no accuracy, a computer nerd calling plays off a laptop, and Devon Sawa as the rival love interest who makes Icebox reconsider whether boys are completely worthless. John Madden shows up as himself and commits fully, exactly what you’d expect from late, great John Madden.
What makes Little Giants hold up better than most of its era is that it never talks down to the kids or softens the actual conflict. Danny is outmatched coaching against his brother. Kevin is a real jerk for most of the film. And Icebox’s subplot about whether to be herself or conform to what Junior wants her to be is handled with more grace than a 1994 Amblin football comedy had any obligation to deliver. The underdog game at the end still works. The comedy still lands. It is exactly the kind of uncomplicated fun that kids movies used to be allowed to be before everything needed a message stamped on it, and Tubi has it for free right now.
Hundra (1983)
Action/Fantasy • 1h 30m
Hundra is a 1983 Spanish-American sword and sorcery film that is rarely talked about and should be more. Laurene Landon plays Hundra, the last surviving warrior of an all-female Amazon tribe wiped out by a marauding band of barbarians. Her tribe’s goddess tells her the bloodline must continue, which means Hundra has to venture into the world of men, find a suitable mate, and convince herself not to kill him in the process. The premise sounds like it should be unwatchable, and instead it works, mostly because Landon commits to the role and carries the whole thing on her back. She is physically convincing as a warrior, funny when the film asks her to be, and compelling in a way that a movie this cheap has no right to produce. The fact that Ennio Morricone scored it, and scored it well, remains one of the more baffling and delightful footnotes in 1980s genre cinema.
Hundra belongs to the same Conan ripoff wave that flooded drive-ins in the early 80s, and it is better than most of what that wave produced. It has a tongue-in-cheek attitude about its own ridiculousness that keeps it from collapsing under the weight of its limitations, the action sequences are enthusiastic if not exactly polished, and the whole thing moves fast enough that you never get bored. This is exactly the kind of film Tubi was made for. Something cheap, something obscure, something that never found the audience it deserved because it got buried in a crowded genre and nobody was paying attention. It is sitting there right now for free, and it is worth ninety minutes of your Tuesday night.
That’s your Tubi Tuesday for this week. Three films, no subscription required, and none of them are going to waste your time with a lecture. Tubi Tuesday runs every week here at Titanquisitor, so check back next Tuesday for three more. And if you’ve got a Tubi hidden gem that deserves a spotlight, drop it in the comments below.
