Hey, come check out my contributing post for the amazing B&S Movies site: Ten from Tubi Week 12.
I've become a huge fan of Sam Panico and B&S, thanks to his encyclopedic yen for Mexican wrestling and 70s American TV disaster movies, two genres I've been exploring this summer, each a kind of cranial air conditioning, made extra cool by the infectious love apparent in B&S's concise reviews.
And we both love the Tubi. Sure it has commercials, but they don't overdo it, and the juxtapositions make a great meta-collage (like going from Texas Chainsaw mid-massacre to a sizzling, juicy stake in an ad for Applebees.
These 10 below are totally different, though. Another ten via the link below. Sooo many weird options.
My TUBI Cue (Deadly Women Edition): 10 Weird Vintage Gems for the High and Inside
And then these. All in all, we're living in a truly blessed age.
A bit of a slow burner, on minimal sets, and one very strange and cool empty house (I get the impression the story was written around it), this starts with a happily engaged couple picnicking on a sprawling lawn to the house she "designed" and he's eyeing with veiled trepidation. David (Arthur Roberts), we gradually learn, is an ambitious employee of his fiancee's father (John Beal) whose daughter Barbara (Robin Strasser) is his fairly willful pride and joy. The film starts from that corny image anyone from the 70s is so familiar with (the happy white heterosexual couple frolicking hand in hand through the meadow) and gradually picks at it, all the way to the wedding --Barbara's big happy day -- when she lunges at him with a pair of scissors for snogging upstairs with his ex, Ellen (Iva Jean Saraceni) mere moments after saying "I do."
If you're a stranger to the lucha libre movie world this a fine place to start. Las 'Luchadoras' are a tag team of statuesque wrestling women played by Mexican fantasy film fixture Lorena Velázquez (Ship of Monsters, Invasion of the Martian Women) and American ex-pat Elizabeth Campbell. They fight other female wrestlers in the ring, They brawl with the the mysterious Dr. Doom and his half-dozen henchmen in the streets or they fight in the bad guys' warehouse hide-out, or in the secret--trap door-laden--lab behind it. They fight a lot. Dr. Doom (no relation to the Fantastic Four version) is a villain straight out of the classic Hollywood serials, replete with half-dozen endlessly re-punchable henchmen and a monster from his last successful ape-brain / human crossover experiment (indestructible, thanks to body armor and a metal mask). The doctor keeps sending his monster and henchmen out to recruit new female subjects for his gorilla transplant experiments, but then he decides he needs 'stronger' women for his work (the others die on the operating table). He happens to have heard of two of them...
Amiable, capable, smart and not shy about mopping up the floor with a whole room full of out-of-their-depth (male) abductors, the Luchadoras don't need rescuing; they even come the rescue of their smitten male cop escorts more than once, and they're not threatened by it! Even if you don't go in for wrestling, it's a nice whirlwind of serial-style cliffhanger action, with a real love of strong female characters that America (outside of Russ Meyer) couldn't match. For 1963, that's pretty huge.
The recent upgrade to HD makes it easy to finally stop wading through the murk of Something Weird's old DVD. And if you're aching for more, Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy, is also in remastered HD on Tubi. If you're hooked after Doom and want a kind of sequel and then Robot vs the Aztec Mummy. All terrific, mindless comfort food for the soul and coolant for the troubled brow looking for some monster action to nod off to at four AM.
Special Note:There are other luchadora movies on Tubi, including The Panther Women, and a lot of color Santos movies, but they have much newer dubs that don't really work in my opinions. Don't let them dissuade you from the older stuff, All of the movies mentioned in the above paragraph were dubbed into English back in the 1960s by K. Gordon Murray. Those earlier dubs are relaxed, low-key, the ambient room sound perfectly matched to the image. But scores of luchador movies weren't imported in the 60s by K. Gordon Murray - and thus never dubbed into English until a few years ago by very modern sounding actors. Though they clearly try their best, the badly recorded result sounds way cartoony, modern and canned - a cold table read for the Cartoon Network from yesterday rather than an old black-and-white Mexican wrestling horror movie from 60 years ago.
But at least there's the older dubs, and Tubi has this, Wrestling Women vs. The Aztec Mummy, The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy and Santo in the Wax Museum, and you can find it, Santos vs. The Vampire Women and The Curse of the Aztec Mummy all with the original English dubs (as well as several other options in Spanish with burned on or fan-made subtitles - check out my curated Tubi list: Mexico de Macabre.)
Speaking of cranky opinions, I don't like the first two Shark Attack movies and I never liked smamy Shark Attack 3 star John Barrowman (he kept me out of Torchwood) until I learned he was 'out' as a gay man Strange as that may seem, learning Barrowman was gay made him less offensive. His narcissism makes more sense (maybe if Tom Cruise ever came out, I'd finally like him, too). Anyway, that means I can finally enjoy Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, in which he stars as--you guessed it--a smarmy/cocky chief of security at a Cozumel resort. He's destined to fight a large--presumed extinct--fish, a big ass shark, and he'll need all the help a sultry marine paleontologist (Jenny McShane) and her two person documentary crew can lend. Will the inevitable sparks fly between this oceanic white prick and this blue-haired blond-eyed hottie sent from her museum by her smitten dope of a boss? And you better believe there'll be a corporate whistleblower (Roy Cutrona) fingering the shady outfit he used to work for, who cut corners laying a deepwater trench-adjacent electric cable, and who have the mayor and resort owner both in their pocket$.
Sure it's as shoddy, weather-beaten at the seams, but that's why it's also perfect for a lazy summer afternoon when it's too hot to move more than ten feet from your air conditioner and you're in the mood to see some giant sharks eating yachts full of environmentally irresponsible capitalists in the beautiful waters off resort-studded Mexico. There are other percs as well, setting this one rung above the average Asylum Syfy CGI fodder (several of the shots of the giant shark rising out of the water to devour whole boats are excellent; I couldn't tell if they were using miniatures, or just really well-done analog overlays). And I like that it doesn't feel the need to overdo the capitalist evil 'keep a lid on it' schtick. This movie knows you can make even the greediest capitalists somewhat sympathetic and we'll still cheer with bloodthirsty joy when they, their wives, the mayor, and everyone on their swanky yacht, and the yacht itself, are devoured in big cathartic gulps.
NOTE: Be sure and get the R-rated version (not the PG-13) both are on Youtube so it's easy to make the mistake. And if you don't get the R, you'll miss the greatest WTF? line in shark attack history.
I like so much about this movie. I like the weird accent of the faux-semi (possibly real?) Native American or maybe Mexican guide. It's how I'd imagine someone with that accent would actually talk, i.e. like he's unconsciously trying to hide it rather than accentuate it the way a lesser actor would. I like Tartu lounging in his coffin listening to his scratchy old tribal drums LP (Can the onscreen characters hear the chanting like ghosts in the distance, or is it supposed to to be the score? We never know for sure, and I like that). I like the boa constrictor slithering around the skulls and campfire coffee pot. Like the film itself, that serpent knows where he wants to go, but at the same time it's in no hurry to either arrive there or explain why he's going. It just goes on. Then stops suddenly and the whole swamp goes silent. The guide notices and points out how the Everglades are normally shrill with insect buzzing, birdcalls, and splashing noises. But there's nary a sound in Tartu's neck of the 'glades. Eerie moments like that abound without the film ever being anything less than sublimely deadpan, gravely absurdist, and pleasantly warped. In gamely failing to bog down in pointless squabbling or sludgy sermons, it's easily best Everglades-shot movie about an amok undead Native American shapeshifter ever made, with even some T&A and rock and roll dancing on the hardwood hammock, if you know what I mean. 
(1962) Dir. Mario Bava
I don't mean that as a dis. The colorful language is part of the reason why I love this damn film. The other part, the white whale, I mean 'buff' is not a convincing buffalo at any time. He's just a big angry monster of a thing, only appearing at night in snowy scenes Thompson wisely shot on a big dark soundstage, with falling fake snow and swirling mist, out of which the beast comes charging. The effect is to make the beast dreamlike, an a true vision/hallucination juggernaut that transcends the boundary between visions, nightmares, and reality. As a kid who loved big haunted house rides and Epcot Center dinosaurs, I'm a sucker for life-size big animatronic behemoths. if you were a kid in the 70s you may remember being excited for Di Laurentiis's 1976 King Kong was to be be a massive life-size giant ape robot. Instead, we got Rick Baker in a monkey suit. Was this buffalo his attempt at apology? If so, good job, Dino! When it charges, it goes by as if on wheels on a hidden train track, its head bopping up and down mechanically, steam billowing from its nose like twin smokestacks. Add it chasing Bronson around in the snow while Samson rides it, stabbing furiously, or irs massive head smashing through a giant rock wall to get at them, and you have a cool breath of rocky mountain Moby Dick meets snow Jaws. Kind of, for awhile, maybe.
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| Samson and Bronson bond from 30 yards away by making crazy hand gestures and shouting across the snowy hilltop |
The opening blurb --an ad for the film you are about to see-- declares Shclock! the greatest film since 2001, and who are we to doubt it? John Landis, the director of Animal House and American Werewolf in London, had to start somewhere. Indeed, so did mankind itself. And here is the starting point for both: a smart and refreshingly deadpan 'spoof' of every movie e'er made that e'er had an ape in it (and even some that don't). With a great termite attention to momentum akin to Italian movies like those two-fisted Italian Terence Stamp-Bud Spencer comedies of the same era, Landis keeps itself in the groovy moment with a plot that makes reverent use of the entirety of classic creature features without ever mugging or clowning or showing disdain for its audience or inspirations.
Landis himself (in an early Rick Baker-designed gorilla suit) plays the mighty 'Shlockthropus,' thawed out of his frozen tomb ala Trog or Return of the Ape Man, Schlock goes on a spree of random killing and grappling with the strange new world of 70s small town culture, as in his triple-digit massacre of everyone at the 'Canyon Valley Metaphysical Bowling Society's Annual Picnic'. Scenes like his bonding with a girl throwing bread to the ducks trade on our familiarity with the 1931 Frankenstein's "flower toss" scene, for just one example of the films referenced.
Despite the staggering toll in life, limb, and property wrought by the Schlockthropus--trash bags full of limbs, broken store windows--Landis' deadpan black humor never wavers, never making light of the carnage, but approaching it with the same dead-eyed square jawed scientific self-seriousness we see in countless 50s monster movies. No one plays it anything but straight and deadpan, that's why it works. The TV announcer on the scene of Schlock's opening massacre may initiate a contest to guess the total limb count, but he doesn't go 'whoa! whoa!' and surf on a banana peel. A blind girl in a wheelchair may force Schlock to keep retrieving a thrown stick, and maybe he can't figure out how to use a soda machine, but damnit, Schlock keeps his dignity. Under Landis' watch even common 70s prank call parlance, like asking a hard-working scientist about Prince Albert in a Can, is made funny again by being delivered so mercilessly serious. David Gibson's music score could have easily gone the dopey silent film comedy route (Boing!) we'd expect from someone like Les Baxter, but instead sits the inning out or plays the deadpan suspense card. As far as the score concerned, Schlock is as serious as Trog.
In addition to being a time capsule of old chestnuts (one character even says "I feel a lot more like I do now than I did when I got here" --my granny's frequent one martini-in catchphrase), endless deep cut in-jokes for Landis' fellow classic monster lovers (Forry Ackerman cameo!), there's an extended uber-meta theater scene wherein Schlock sees a movie called Dinosaurus vs. the Blob which provides a smorgasbord of epiphany via clips from both. (Schlock grasps the implications when he sees people talking about the thawed cave man in Dinosaurus). And in a moment of post-meta sublimity the crowd in the theater watching The Blob's are watching the scene where everyone is watching Daughter of Horror run out of the theater chased by the blob around the same time they start screaming and running out of the theater chased by Schlock --double meta double feature termite in-joke heaven! See it alone or with anyone who remembers creature double features on local TV, and cry... cry for the ape person old enough to remember that simpler time, an ape person with no stake in the modern world, who has to die one day.... that's you, dude! But til then, there's Tubi!
