Tubi Tuesday: Three Films Worth Your Time This Week
Another Tuesday is upon us, and that means it’s time to dig through Tubi’s enormous collection of movies and find three more worth watching without spending a dime. We’re well into October now, Halloween is just around the corner, and while Thalia continues her campaign to make the internet considerably less respectable with her Spook-n-Boobtacular, we’ve still got plenty of entertainment to enjoy elsewhere in the Halls.
This week on Tubi Tuesday we’re stealing expensive cars with Nicolas Cage, revisiting one of the most gloriously ridiculous video game adaptations of the 1990s with Jean-Claude Van Damme, and finishing things off with a particularly nasty piece of science-fiction horror from 1988. We’ve got action, comedy, nostalgia, and enough practical-effects carnage to make any horror fan happy.
Gone in 60 Seconds (2000)
Action/Crime/Thriller • 1h 58m
Last week we talked about Christine, John Carpenter’s 1983 horror movie about a beautiful old Plymouth Fury with a rather unfortunate tendency to murder people. This week we’re sticking with gorgeous automobiles, although thankfully none of the cars in Gone in 60 Seconds are possessed by supernatural forces.
Instead, we’ve got Nicolas Cage trying to steal fifty of them in one night.
Cage plays Randall “Memphis” Raines, a legendary car thief who has supposedly retired from the business and settled into a quieter life. Unfortunately, his younger brother Kip, played by Giovanni Ribisi, has managed to get himself into serious trouble with a criminal named Raymond Calitri, who isn’t really interested in hearing excuses about why the cars he was promised haven’t been delivered.
Memphis has one option if he wants to save his brother’s life: assemble his old crew, steal fifty specific cars, and deliver them before the deadline. Naturally, this is, of course, easier said than done.
The cast is a big part of the appeal here. Angelina Jolie plays Sara “Sway” Wayland, Memphis’s former girlfriend and fellow car thief, while Robert Duvall brings some welcome old-school charm as Otto Halliwell. Delroy Lindo plays Detective Roland Castlebeck, who’s determined to catch Memphis, and you’ve also got Will Patton, Chi McBride, and Vinnie Jones filling out an entertaining collection of characters.
It’s exactly the sort of cast you’d expect from a big-budget Hollywood action movie released in 2000, back when studios were perfectly happy to throw a bunch of recognizable actors into a ridiculous premise, spend millions of dollars wrecking cars, and send the whole thing into theaters without worrying about whether it could support another twelve installments.
And, I miss that.
Gone in 60 Seconds is a remake of the 1974 H.B. Halicki film, but the two movies have fairly different personalities. The original is remembered primarily for its incredible extended car chase, while the 2000 version is a slick Jerry Bruckheimer production filled with movie stars, stylish photography, loud music, and the kind of over-the-top action that defined the era.
Is the story believable? Not even remotely. Is stealing fifty high-end automobiles in one night a reasonable solution to anybody’s problems? Probably not. But that’s hardly the point. The point is watching Nicolas Cage and his crew put together an elaborate automotive crime spree while the police close in and the clock keeps ticking.
And then there’s Eleanor.
The 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500 is the real star of the movie as far as I’m concerned. That silver beauty with the black racing stripes is one of the most recognizable movie cars of the last several decades, and the film wisely saves some of its biggest automotive excitement for Memphis’s attempts to get his hands on her.
The climactic chase is ridiculous in all the right ways, featuring speeding police cars, impossible maneuvers, and one particular jump that nobody should attempt in a real Mustang. But it looks fantastic, and sometimes that’s more important than whether the laws of physics approve.
Gone in 60 Seconds isn’t trying to reinvent cinema. It’s a slick, entertaining action movie with a likable cast, gorgeous cars, and enough personality to make the whole thing enjoyable. And unlike Christine, Eleanor probably won’t murder your friends out of jealousy.
Probably.
Street Fighter (1994)
Action/Adventure/Comedy • 1h 42m
For you, the day Street Fighter appeared on Tubi Tuesday was the most important day of your life.
But for M. Bison, it was Tuesday.
I’m sorry, but there was absolutely no way I was writing about this movie in a column called Tubi Tuesday without making that joke.
Released in 1994, Street Fighter is one of those wonderfully strange Hollywood productions that could only have happened during the decade when everybody was convinced video games were the next great source of blockbuster movie franchises. Following the success of Street Fighter II in arcades and on home consoles, Universal Pictures decided to bring Capcom’s fighting-game phenomenon to the big screen.
And naturally, the obvious choice to play American military hero Colonel William F. Guile was Belgian martial arts star Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Because why the hell not?
Van Damme leads an international military force attempting to overthrow General M. Bison, played by Raúl Juliá, a megalomaniacal dictator who has taken hostages and is threatening the world with his own private army. Along for the ride are characters familiar to anybody who spent time playing Street Fighter II, including Chun-Li, Cammy, Ken, Ryu, E. Honda, Zangief, Dhalsim, and Blanka.
If you’re expecting a faithful adaptation of the games, you’re going to have a few questions.
Why are Ken and Ryu running around as small-time con artists? Why is Dhalsim a scientist? Why is Blanka the result of some bizarre genetic experiment? And why does practically everybody spend more time shooting guns and running around military installations than actually participating in street fights?
The answer, apparently, is that somebody in Hollywood decided a straightforward martial arts tournament wasn’t nearly complicated enough.
But, Street Fighter is enormously entertaining if you’re willing to accept it for the ridiculous movie it actually is.
Van Damme is clearly having a good time playing the heroic Guile, complete with an American flag tattoo and a speech about going home that somehow manages to be both incredibly cheesy and suprisingly crowd-pleasing. Kylie Minogue plays Cammy, Ming-Na Wen brings some welcome attitude to Chun-Li, and the whole cast throws itself into a movie that never seems entirely certain whether it’s supposed to be an action spectacle or a comedy.
And then there’s Raúl Juliá.
Good Lord, Raúl Juliá.
While practically everybody else is making a goofy video game movie, Juliá is delivering the performance of a lifetime as M. Bison. He chews through the scenery with such magnificent enthusiasm that you almost expect him to start eating the furniture. Every line is delivered like he’s performing Shakespeare, and somehow it works beautifully.
His famous exchange with Chun-Li, where she recalls the destruction of her village and Bison dismisses the event as an ordinary Tuesday, remains one of the greatest villain moments in a movie that has absolutely no business containing something that memorable.
Juliá was seriously ill during production and died before the film reached theaters. Knowing that makes his performance even more remarkable, because whatever else you can say about Street Fighter, he certainly didn’t phone it in.
And there’s another reason we’re revisiting this particular bit of 1990s nonsense right now.
A new live-action Street Fighter movie has brought Capcom’s characters back to theaters, and the casting has caught my attention for reasons beyond the video games themselves. WWF wrestlers Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns are involved, playing Guile and Akuma respectively. So we’ve now got a franchise connecting Jean-Claude Van Damme, professional wrestling, and one of the biggest fighting games of all time.
That’s practically the entire Titanquisitor editorial department represented in one movie.
Whether the new film turns out to be any good remains to be seen, but it’ll certainly have some work to do if it wants to match the sheer entertainment value of Raúl Juliá carrying a film like it was going to be the best film ever made.
Street Fighter is a mess. A glorious, colorful, frequently stupid mess that I can’t help finding entertaining. It isn’t one of the great video game adaptations, but it’s certainly one of the most memorable.
And on Tubi Tuesday, that’s good enough for me.
The Blob (1988)
Horror/Sci-Fi • 1h 35m
There are plenty of monsters in horror movies that you can at least attempt to reason with. Vampires have rules, werewolves have weaknesses, and even Michael Myers occasionally gives somebody enough time to run away.
But what the hell are you supposed to do when the monster is a gigantic mass of pink slime that wants to dissolve and eat everything it touches?
That’s the problem facing the unfortunate residents of Arborville in The Blob, Chuck Russell’s wonderfully nasty 1988 remake of the 1958 science-fiction horror classic.
The original Blob, starring a young Steve McQueen, was a quintessential drive-in monster movie about an alien substance that crashes to Earth and begins consuming the residents of a small town. It’s a charming piece of 1950s science fiction, and the title creature became one of the era’s most recognizable movie monsters.
Thirty years later, Russell decided the basic idea was still perfectly good, but what it really needed was more screaming, melting flesh, and people being consumed in spectacularly disgusting ways.
And he wasn’t wrong.
The story begins when a mysterious object crashes near a small California town, releasing a strange gelatinous substance that attaches itself to an unfortunate homeless man. Before long, the creature begins consuming people, growing larger with every victim, and demonstrating that there’s practically nowhere you can hide from something capable of squeezing through drains, vents, and other impossibly small spaces.
Kevin Dillon plays Brian Flagg, the town’s motorcycle-riding teenage troublemaker, while Shawnee Smith plays Meg Penny, a cheerleader who quickly discovers that her evening is going to involve a lot more terror than she originally anticipated. I realize I said that like she was anticipating any terror at all. You never know.
Together, they find themselves trying to survive an increasingly deadly situation while the authorities prove to be way less helpful than anybody would like. But, come on, authorities and uselessness go together like horse and a carriage… You can’t have one without the other.
What really sets The Blob apart from so many other horror movies of its era is the practical effects. Good grief, the practical effects.
People are pulled apart, dissolved, swallowed whole, and reduced to horrifying collections of partially digested remains. The creature itself is constantly changing shape, stretching across rooms, squeezing through openings, and generally making an absolute nightmare of itself.
And because so much of it was accomplished with physical effects, puppetry, makeup, and elaborate mechanical creations, there’s a tangible nastiness to the whole thing that still holds up beautifully.
The famous sink sequence is particularly memorable, and there’s another scene involving a telephone booth that makes a pretty convincing argument for never using a public phone again.
One thing I appreciate about The Blob is that it doesn’t play by the usual rules about who gets to survive a horror movie. Characters who seem perfectly safe can suddenly find themselves on the menu, and the film isn’t interested in giving everybody a heroic last-minute escape.
That unpredictability makes the creature more entertaining- er, I mean, frightening. Yeah, that’s supposed to be the word.
There’s also a government conspiracy element that gives the story a little more substance than simply watching a monster eat people. Without spoiling too much, the film takes the original’s extraterrestrial premise in a different direction, and the resulting revelations make the whole situation even more unpleasant.
But let’s not pretend anybody is watching The Blob primarily for its commentary on government secrecy.
We’re watching because a giant pink monster is melting people, and the effects artists clearly had an absolute blast figuring out new and disgusting ways to make that happen.
And with Halloween less than two weeks away, I can’t think of a much better way to spend an October evening.
The Blob is one of those remakes that justifies its existence. It takes a simple, entertaining concept from an earlier era and updates it with more intensity, better effects, and a mean streak that makes the whole thing way more memorable. The exact opposite of how remakes work today, where they take an entertaining concept that holds up, suck the enjoyment out of it, race and gender swap all the actors, and lecture you about why the original was really problematic all along. Someone let this Blob loose on Hollywood, and I mean that literally, not asking for a remake over here.
If you’ve never seen it, you’re in for a treat. Just maybe finish eating before you turn it on, or don’t; it could be part of the fun.
That’s your Tubi Tuesday for this week. Three films, no subscription required, and somehow we’ve managed to go from stealing a beautiful Mustang to watching Jean-Claude Van Damme fight a video game dictator before ending the evening with people being dissolved by an enormous pile of pink goo. That’s pretty van damn entertaining line-up if you ask me, or even if you don’t, after all, it’s my column.
And if anybody asks why we chose Street Fighter this week, just tell them it was Tuesday.
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.
