Tubi Tuesday: Three Films Worth Your Time This Week
We’re getting closer to Halloween, and while Thalia is busy doing whatever the hell she’s doing, the rest of us still have movies to watch. Fortunately, Tubi continues to provide an almost endless supply of entertainment without asking us to hand over another fifteen dollars a month, and as always, I’ve dug through the catalog to find three movies worth spending some time with.
This week we’ve got Steven Seagal getting himself thrown into prison, a cyborg police officer cleaning up the streets of Detroit, and a beautiful 1958 Plymouth Fury that happens to have a rather unfortunate habit of murdering people. Two action movies and a little Stephen King horror to remind us that sometimes the most dangerous thing on the road isn’t the idiot staring at his phone.
Today You Die (2005)
Action/Crime/Thriller • 1h 30m
There was a time when Steven Seagal was one of the biggest action stars in Hollywood, turning out movies like Above the Law, Hard to Kill, Marked for Death, and Under Siege. By the mid-2000s, however, those theatrical blockbusters had largely given way to a seemingly endless parade of direct-to-video action movies, many of which seemed to exist primarily so somebody could put Steven Seagal holding a gun on the DVD cover.
And if you read last week’s Tubi Tuesday, where I mentioned picking up Maverick on VHS for $1.50, here’s the rest of that story. I also bought The Patriot on that same thrift-store trip, a Steven Seagal movie I’ve somehow never seen. Unfortunately, when I got home and opened the box, instead of Seagal I found an old Movie Gallery rental copy of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles: Chapter 16. Apparently, the thrift store decided I needed more Indiana Jones in my life.
Anyway, Today You Die is one of those direct-to-video movies.
Seagal plays Harlan Banks, a professional thief who’s supposedly trying to leave his criminal past behind and live a better life with his girlfriend. Unfortunately, like just about every retired criminal in the history of action movies, Harlan decides to take one last job, which naturally goes completely to hell.
He’s hired to drive an armored truck carrying millions of dollars, only to discover that the people employing him have no intention of letting him walk away afterward. Before long, Harlan finds himself framed, arrested, and thrown into prison, where he befriends an inmate named Ice Kool, played by Anthony “Treach” Criss. The two eventually escape and set about finding the people responsible for setting Harlan up.
And if you’ve ever watched a Steven Seagal movie, you already know that finding those people isn’t going to end with a polite conversation.
This is very much the sort of movie that helped define the direct-to-DVD action market of the 2000s. The plot exists mainly to move Seagal from one confrontation to another, the villains are thoroughly disposable, and the whole production has that unmistakable feeling of something assembled quickly and inexpensively for the rental shelves.
There are shootouts, prison fights, betrayals, explosions, and plenty of people making the unfortunate decision to get within arm’s reach of Steven Seagal. The problem is that Seagal himself isn’t exactly operating at the level he was during his early career, and some of the action is considerably less convincing than it probably looked on paper.
But that’s also part of the strange appeal of these movies.
I have a soft spot for the direct-to-video action era, when practically every trip to the video store meant discovering another movie starring Seagal, Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, or somebody else who had once been a major theatrical attraction. Some of those movies were surprisingly entertaining, others were complete garbage, and quite a few fell somewhere in the middle. But they filled the shelves, and there was something enjoyable about taking a chance on one without knowing exactly what you were getting.
Today You Die certainly isn’t Under Siege, and I wouldn’t recommend it to somebody looking for an introduction to Steven Seagal’s career. But if you’re familiar with his later output, enjoy cheap action movies, and occasionally miss the days when the video store had an entire wall dedicated to movies like this, Tubi has you covered.
Just don’t expect cinematic greatness.
RoboCop (1987)
Action/Sci-Fi/Crime • 1h 42m
Now we’re talking.
There are plenty of great action movies from the 1980s, but RoboCop is one of those rare films that manages to be incredibly entertaining while also having something actually interesting to say underneath all the gunfire, violence, and exploding bodies.
Directed by Paul Verhoeven, RoboCop takes place in a near-future Detroit where crime has spiraled out of control, and a massive corporation called Omni Consumer Products has essentially taken over the police department. OCP has big plans for the city, including replacing much of old Detroit with a shiny new development called Delta City, and naturally the corporation sees law enforcement as another opportunity to make money.
Enter Alex Murphy, played by Peter Weller, a police officer who has the spectacular misfortune of being transferred into one of the most dangerous precincts in the city.
Murphy and his partner Anne Lewis, played by Nancy Allen, quickly find themselves pursuing a gang led by Clarence Boddicker, played by Kurtwood Smith. What follows is one of the most brutally violent sequences in mainstream 1980s action cinema, as Murphy is tortured and murdered by Boddicker and his gang.
OCP, however, sees an opportunity.
Using what’s left of Murphy’s body, the corporation creates RoboCop, a heavily armored cyborg police officer programmed to serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and uphold the law. Unfortunately for OCP, there’s still a human being somewhere underneath all that machinery, and Murphy’s memories begin returning as he investigates the circumstances surrounding his own death.
What makes RoboCop so damn good is that it works on several different levels without ever losing sight of being an entertaining action movie.
On the surface, it’s a story about a nearly indestructible cyborg blasting his way through Detroit’s criminal population. And believe me, there is plenty of blasting. The violence is ridiculously excessive, the villains are wonderfully horrible people, and the action sequences are still impressive nearly forty years later.
But underneath all of that is a vicious satire of corporate greed, privatization, consumer culture, and the idea that absolutely everything in American life can be turned into a business opportunity. OCP doesn’t see Murphy as a human being who died in the line of duty. It sees him as company property, a product that can be manufactured, marketed, and sold.
The fake television commercials and news broadcasts scattered throughout the film are some of my favorite touches. They’re funny, disturbing, and occasionally so ridiculous that you almost forget how closely they resemble the kind of nonsense we see in real advertising.
And then there’s Clarence Boddicker. Kurtwood Smith is absolutely fantastic as one of the most memorable villains of the decade. He’s vicious, sarcastic, completely without conscience, and somehow manages to be both terrifying and darkly hilarious. Anybody who only knows Smith as Red Forman from That ’70s Show is in for one hell of a surprise.
Peter Weller also deserves enormous credit for making RoboCop feel like an actual character despite spending most of the movie hidden underneath an enormous mechanical costume. The movements, the voice, and especially the moments when Murphy’s humanity begins breaking through the programming give the movie an emotional weight that could easily have been missing.
And of course, we can’t forget ED-209, OCP’s other attempt at robotic law enforcement, which demonstrates rather spectacularly why letting a corporation rush an armed machine into production might not be the smartest idea.
I’d happily put RoboCop among the best science-fiction action movies ever made. It’s violent, funny, intelligent, endlessly quotable, and still has plenty to say about the world we’re living in. If you’ve somehow never watched the original, do yourself a favor and fix that. And make sure it’s the 1987 film, not the remake.
And this is mostly unrelated to the movie, but I still absolutely love the glorious cheese that was WCW’s Capital Combat: Return of RoboCop pay-per-view in 1990, where RoboCop himself showed up to rescue Sting from the Four Horsemen. Stupid? Absurdly. Pure WrestleCrap? Absolutely. Terrible? God, yes. But damn if I don’t still get a kick out of it, and that counts for something.
Christine (1983)
Horror/Thriller • 1h 50m
Stephen King has written about haunted hotels, possessed children, murderous clowns, and all manner of supernatural horrors, but one of his more entertaining creations is a bright red 1958 Plymouth Fury that apparently decided being an automobile wasn’t nearly as satisfying as being a homicidal maniac.
Directed by John Carpenter, Christine tells the story of Arnie Cunningham, played by Keith Gordon, an awkward high school teenager who spends most of his time being bullied and generally having a miserable existence. His best friend Dennis, played by John Stockwell, is quite a bit more popular and does his best to look out for Arnie, but things begin changing when Arnie spots a beat-up old Plymouth Fury sitting in somebody’s yard.
For reasons nobody else can understand, Arnie immediately falls in love with the car.
He buys it against practically everyone’s advice, takes it to a local garage, and begins restoring it. Before long, the rusty old wreck has transformed into a gorgeous red-and-white automobile, and Arnie himself starts changing right along with it.
Unfortunately, Christine isn’t particularly interested in sharing her new boyfriend.
What follows is a wonderfully strange combination of supernatural horror, teenage drama, and automotive obsession, as Christine begins taking revenge on anybody who threatens Arnie or gets between the two of them. And when I say taking revenge, I don’t mean somebody finds a flat tire in the driveway.
Christine is perfectly capable of hunting people down, repairing her own damage, and turning an otherwise ordinary drive into the last mistake somebody ever makes.
One of the best things about this movie is how Carpenter manages to make a car genuinely threatening without turning the entire thing into a ridiculous comedy. There’s something unsettling, yet extremely entertaining, about seeing an empty automobile slowly come to life, headlights glowing in the darkness, while you realize that whoever is standing in front of it is about to have a very bad evening.
The practical effects are another enormous part of the appeal. Watching Christine repair herself, with twisted metal pulling back into shape and shattered bodywork restoring itself, is still impressive today. It’s the sort of filmmaking trick that makes you appreciate what effects artists could accomplish before computers became the answer to practically everything.
But the real story isn’t simply about a murderous car. It’s about Arnie.
Keith Gordon does a great job portraying his transformation from a timid, bullied teenager into somebody increasingly arrogant, aggressive, and obsessed with Christine. The car gives him confidence, status, and a sense of power he never had before, but the more attached he becomes to it, the more he loses everything else that once mattered to him.
It’s a surprisingly effective story about obsession and how easily something you love can take over your entire life. Of course, it also helps that Christine is a beautiful automobile.
I’ve always appreciated classic cars, and the late 1950s produced some absolutely gorgeous American machines. The enormous chrome grilles, tailfins, distinctive styling, and ridiculous amount of personality those cars had are a far cry from the endless parade of nearly identical vehicles rolling off assembly lines today.
Although admittedly, most of those old cars weren’t actively trying to murder their owners’ enemies. At least as far as we know.
Christine might not be the first John Carpenter movie people think of when Halloween rolls around, especially with Halloween and The Thing sitting in his filmography, but it’s an excellent choice for an October movie night. It’s atmospheric, entertaining, occasionally nasty, and has one of the most memorable automobiles in movie history.
Just remember, if you ever find a beautiful old Plymouth Fury for sale at a suspiciously low price, you might want to ask a few questions before handing over the money. Or don’t, your call. Just stay the hell away from me.
That’s your Tubi Tuesday for this week. Three films, no subscription required, and between RoboCop and Christine, we’ve got two very good reasons to be suspicious of machinery that starts thinking for itself. Although after watching Today You Die, maybe the machines aren’t the only things we should be worried about.
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.
