Tubi Tuesday: Three Films Worth Your Time This Week
October is here, Halloween is getting closer, and Tubi continues to make an excellent argument for why paying for seventeen different streaming services is completely unnecessary. Every week I dig through its ridiculously large catalog and pull out three movies worth spending a couple of hours with, whether it’s an old favorite, something you haven’t seen in years, or something you somehow missed entirely.
This week we’ve got the Mistress of the Dark herself arriving just in time for Halloween, one of my favorite comedies of the 1990s, and Chuck Norris going back to Vietnam because asking nicely about the missing POWs wasn’t getting the job done.
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988)
Comedy/Horror • 1h 36m
If you’re going to watch Elvira, October seems like the appropriate time to do it.
Cassandra Peterson takes her horror-host character out from behind the television desk and gives her an entire movie in Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, a wonderfully stupid, shamelessly horny horror-comedy from 1988 that knows exactly what its star attraction is and makes no apologies for it.
Elvira quits her television job with dreams of taking her act to Las Vegas, only to discover that she needs $50,000 to make it happen. Conveniently, she learns that her great-aunt has died and left her an inheritance, so off she goes to the wonderfully named Fallwell, Massachusetts, expecting that her financial problems are about to be solved.
Instead, she inherits a rundown old house, a poodle, and what appears to be an old cookbook.
Naturally, the cookbook isn’t a cookbook.
Fallwell is exactly the wrong town for Elvira to arrive in. It’s an uptight little place run by people who act like somebody showing a little cleavage is the first sign of the apocalypse, which means Elvira basically causes a community-wide emergency simply by getting out of her car. The teenagers love her, the adults are horrified by her, and Elvira responds to all of it by being Elvira.
That’s really the entire appeal of the movie.
Cassandra Peterson obviously understands the character and never plays any of this like she’s embarrassed by it. Elvira is sarcastic, confident, quick with a dirty joke, and completely comfortable being the strangest person in any room she walks into. The movie is loaded with boob jokes, double entendres, stupid sight gags, and humor that would probably have somebody somewhere writing a twelve-page think piece about it today.
Thank God this was made in 1988.
There’s an actual supernatural story underneath all the jokes, as Elvira’s creepy Uncle Vincent becomes very interested in that mysterious book she inherited, and before long we’ve got witchcraft, spells, an angry morality club, and a town that decides burning Elvira at the stake might be a reasonable solution to its problems.
It isn’t remotely scary, nor is it trying to be. This is camp from beginning to end, built around Peterson’s personality and the ridiculous collision between Elvira and small-town respectability. Some of the jokes are incredibly dumb. Quite a few of them are about her breasts. Most of them work anyway. And honestly, sometimes that’s exactly what you want from an October movie.
There are plenty of legit scary movies to watch between now and Halloween. Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is what you put on when you want the decorations, witches, and spooky atmosphere without spending the next two hours watching people get dismembered.
Plus, it’s Elvira. That’s really enough of a selling point on its own. How can anyone not love Elvira? Hot, funny, and with impeccable attire that’s both revealing and kinda classy at the same time.
Maverick (1994)
Western/Comedy/Adventure • 2h 7m
I’ve already reviewed Maverick for Throwback Thursday, so I’m not going to pretend this is some movie I stumbled across while digging through Tubi. I love this film.
Mel Gibson plays Bret Maverick, a professional gambler and con artist trying to scrape together enough money to enter a massive winner-take-all poker tournament. That sends him bouncing across the Old West hustling people, collecting debts, getting himself into trouble, and trying to stay one step ahead of everybody else long enough to reach the poker table.
Along the way he ends up traveling with Annabelle Bransford, played by Jodie Foster, and Marshal Zane Cooper, played by James Garner. All three are running their own angles, nobody completely trusts anybody else, and the chemistry between them is what makes the movie work as well as it does.
Gibson was at his absolute peak here. He’s charming, funny, occasionally ridiculous, and completely believable as a guy who can talk himself into trouble and then somehow talk himself right back out of it. I’ve said it before, Mel Gibson is my favorite actor, and Maverick is one of the movies that demonstrates exactly why.
Jodie Foster is every bit as good. Annabelle is basically Maverick’s equal, constantly scheming and looking for an advantage, and Foster gets to show off a comedic side that doesn’t get mentioned enough when people talk about her career.
Then you’ve got James Garner, which is where the movie gets especially fun. Garner was the original Bret Maverick from the 1950s television series, so putting him opposite Gibson was already a great piece of casting before the movie starts having fun with that history.
But my favorite supporting character is still Graham Greene as Joseph, Maverick’s Native American friend who turns up midway through the movie. Greene has this amazing dry delivery where he barely seems to be trying and still walks away with practically every scene he’s in. The recurring argument over the money Joseph owes Maverick remains one of my favorite running gags in the entire film.
Richard Donner keeps everything moving with the right tone. Maverick is a Western, but it never feels heavy. It’s an adventure movie, a road movie, a con-man movie, and eventually a poker movie, but mostly it’s just two hours of incredibly likable actors having fun.
There’s even a fantastic Danny Glover cameo that works considerably better if you’ve seen Lethal Weapon, but I’m not ruining it here for anybody who hasn’t.
My only real complaint remains exactly what it was when I reviewed this back in April: the movie leaves the door wide open for another adventure, and we never got one. That still annoys me.
I would have happily watched Gibson and Garner make another two or three of these things. Instead, Maverick became one of those great one-and-done movies from the ’90s that somehow never turned into a franchise. At least the one we got still holds up beautifully.
If you’ve never seen Maverick, fix that. If you haven’t seen it since the ’90s, Tubi just gave you a very good excuse to watch it again. Also, while this has absolutely nothing to do with Tubi, I did recently pick up a copy of Maverick on VHS from a thrift store for $1.50. I mean, I already had the DVD, but it’s nice to have a legitimate VHS copy of it since the one I did have somewhere was recorded off of HBO back in the mid 1990s and has two other movies on it.
Missing in Action (1984)
Action/Drama • 1h 42m
Sometimes you want clever dialogue, elaborate character development, and a story filled with moral complexity. Sometimes you want Chuck Norris to go into the jungle and blow shit up.
Missing in Action is very much the second kind of movie.
Norris plays Colonel James Braddock, a Vietnam veteran who spent years as a prisoner of war before escaping. Braddock believes American POWs are still being secretly held in Vietnam, despite official insistence that there aren’t any left. He returns with an American delegation investigating the claims, quickly determines that everybody is being lied to and eventually decides that diplomacy has had enough time to work.
This is a Cannon Films production from 1984, so you can probably figure out where things go from there.
Braddock teams up with his old military buddy Tuck, played by the always-great M. Emmet Walsh, loads up on weapons and heads back into Vietnam to bring the missing Americans home himself. Subtlety is not high on the priority list.
This was the era when the one-man-army action movie was becoming its own art form, and Missing in Action is about as pure an example as you’re going to find. Chuck Norris doesn’t need a long speech explaining how dangerous he is. He mostly stares at people until it’s time to start killing them. And then he starts killing them, and everyone watching gets to have a good time.
The movie is basically built around the fantasy of sending one unstoppable American soldier back into Vietnam to finish unfinished business. That’s a theme Hollywood returned to repeatedly during the 1980s, most famously with Rambo: First Blood Part II the following year, and Missing in Action doesn’t bother hiding what kind of audience it was made for.
It’s simple, patriotic, violent Cannon Films action.
This time period was really the peak of the genre, in a way that is rarely seen today. The filmmakers weren’t laying groundwork for a cinematic universe, Braddock isn’t stopping every twenty minutes to question whether punching bad guys makes him just as bad as they are, and nobody is teasing the villain for a streaming series coming eighteen months later.
There are Americans being held prisoner, and Chuck Norris is going to get them by any means necessary. That’s it, that’s the movie.
Critics certainly weren’t kind to Missing in Action, but audiences showed up, and it became one of the movies most closely associated with Norris’ run as an ’80s action star. It also spawned two more Braddock films, because unlike Maverick, somebody in Hollywood actually understood that when you’ve got a character people enjoy watching, you’re allowed to make another movie with him.
Yes, I’m still bitter.
Missing in Action isn’t sophisticated, and nobody involved was under the impression that they were making Apocalypse Now. But if you’ve got a soft spot for Cannon Films, ’80s action movies, practical explosions, and Chuck Norris destroying an unreasonable number of people by himself, this is exactly what you’re looking for.
That’s your Tubi Tuesday for this week. Three films, no subscription required, and somehow Elvira has the most restrained wardrobe of anything we’re covering on Titanquisitor this October. That may or may not be a tease for a level of stupidity not seen on the Internet in a long time. When Thalia has an idea, it’s best to at least entertain it.
But for now, probably best not to think too hard about that.
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.
