Tubi…or Not Tubi?

Monday is Movie Day.

I resisted Tubi for a while. A few people mentioned that I might like it, given it has a lot of content, and within that a lot of martial arts and horror films.

Tubi is free and easy to install on your smart TV or access via a browser. The catch is that you can give away your data to remove the ads, or you can watch it with ad-breaks (like TVNZ and Three’s on demand services).

The other catch is, like all streaming services, it’s a demented time-suck.

But for right now, I’m all in on Tubi. Loving it…

It's a bit like downloading Candy Crush to your phone. You need some sort of safety word, a time-out phrase so you can come up for air. And maybe after a month or three you’ll just delete it from view and never talk about it ever again.

But for right now, I want to talk about Tubi. And besides, I have never played Candy Crush. So, I reckon I’m in the clear.

Tubi’s collection of free movies is insane. It is basically every made-for-TV nonsense, every 70s and 80s Video Nasty that slipped through. It is the closest you might get from the comfort of your couch, of reminiscing about the 1980s Video Store: The mythical video store. In my case, the video store from my childhood.

When we were six, seven, eight years old…we being me, my cousins and my brother (who had a few years on us and was therefore ‘the responsible one’) we found our second home in The Green Frog Video Store, in Napier. We were not early adopters. We did not have a VHS player. But my aunty did. So, weekends and holidays were spent a 20-minute drive from home, and then the adults would let us go to the video store and browse the killer racks.

They were sure we were just bringing home E.T. and Indiana Jones and Star Wars. And we did….sure.

But we also brought home The Toxic Avenger and Class of 1984 and Being Different and Freaks and those weird films that were one-part nature documentary, one-part Video Nasty: Leopards getting ripped apart in front of your eyes by crocodiles, hunters chasing down an ostrich on foot and twisting its neck, cut to a scene of a catwalk with a model as thin as an ostrich leg hot-footing it down the runway in a cloak with beautiful plumage…

I’m still sure I learned a lot from all this. But I have no idea what it was or how to explain what I learned.

Late last year my father told me he didn’t think it appropriate that I let my son watch 1985’s comedy-horror, Fright Night. (There were boobs in the opening few minutes).

I pointed out that I was his age when I saw it.

“I don’t think so”, dad huffed. And then, with pantomime indignance, “Where was I in all this?”

Um, in the next room, drinking and playing cards.

There’s no way to make that sound okay in 2022, right? But it’s the truth of how the video store raised me. To get around renting Revenge of The Nerds, and then King Frat, and finally Class of 1984, we would just hand over my aunt’s driver’s licence. You know, to show that someone, somewhere in the vicinity was 18!

Recently I saw Mad Max 2 on the big screen – for its 40th anniversary. In preparation, I rewatched the original Mad Max. A beautiful, brutal film. And one that was never appropriate for me to watch before the age of 10. But I did. And with my folks in the room next door. They were having a good time. And so was I.

Because we grew up not quite with the TV as a babysitter, but always with the knowledge that what was on TV was total fantasy, absolute make-believe. And, within reason, I’m letting Oscar have some of that experience too. Which is why we watch a lot of horror films together. And why he is allowed to watch Stranger Things. And why he was super upset when the rule-enforcers (just doing their jobs) wouldn’t let us in to see the latest Batman film (R-13). A bit tough I thought, and queried, but respectfully their call. So down the hill we trudged…and now it’s in our local video store, and we’ll watch it soon, but probably in two sessions since it’s three hours long, and we’ll laugh at why the R-13 rating exists in this day and age and how silly it was since the dark comic-book violence of Batman isn’t really anything when compared with everything else…

But, um, back to Tubi.

Tubi is where I am getting my fix of all those weird, wild, wonderful cult films and the video lunacy I craved as a teenager.

I wake up early by default now. So, on Saturday mornings, my new fix is a treat film from Tubi’s extensive archive.

On the menu of late, killer cars, giant killer bunny rabbits, oh and the Harry Nilsson-written and scored, Ringo Starr-narrated film, The Point.

There are also incredible music documentaries and concerts. All the maddening, completist stuff in the realm of the “unauthorised”, packs of now out of work music journos boring you non-stop with their knowledge of bands you never cared about like Styx and Journey and Kansas but you watch them anyway. Umpteenth unauthorised docos on Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin with traces of soundalike music rather than the real thing. But also, in there, deep and hiding in the plain sight of Tubi’s seemingly endless-scroll of a menu, you might find the live performance Los Lobos gave of its seminal Kiko album – which is basically the world’s best band playing one of the world’s best albums (and if you don’t believe me, you can fight me in a swamp until one of us is ripped to pieces by an alligator).

I guess I’m writing this to you all – and for myself – as a confession of sorts. Because I still see Tubi and much of its content as a guilty pleasure. Would I watch these films with Oscar? Probably not. I mean, The Point, absolutely. The Toxic Avenger…maybe in another couple of years. But this weekend’s delight, Killer Rack? A 2015 comedy-horror-musical about, well, about breast implants that grow sentient and literally devour the competition and all because the surgeon worships the gods of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos? Um, I mean that’s not even a good way to finish a Substack newsletter.