TUBI TIME - Household Covid Blues Edition

 The whole household was invaded by Omicron last week due to the depredations of the local public school system, so I had a lot of time on my hands.  I spent that time marathoning media in short chunks while tending to the sick and running hours of PBS Kids for the tiny human. 

BATMAN - 1989

An old favorite. Watched this as a family with the teenager in order to illustrate the humble beginings of super hero films and inform him of how lucky he is to be part of nerd culture in the present date. My main point was that at one time having a "fandom" past the age of 10 or so was broadly considered strange and socially unacceptable. That stands in stark contrast to today. Today, having a "fandom" of some kind is a necessary identifiable trait. NOT having some sort of fandom clique to belong to is weird these days. Anyway, this still mostly held up for me. Nicholson's Joker is still fun to watch, and the whole shebang really rests on his shoulders. It was kind of neat watching Joker be genuinely funny and colorful. Keaton still feels like a weird choice for Batman to my present-day eyes. I'm not sure that Bruce Wayne really works for me as the stammering, neurotic lead in a romantic comedy. He's fine, but it was pretty jarring. I don't really buy him as a badass, and I prefer my Batman to be a bit more cool and haunted as opposed to twitchy, overcaffeinated, and vaguely charming.

DEAD END - 2003

This was a lot of fun and felt like a real find. Ray Wise and Linn Shaye make for a really fun, bitter married couple, and when they start losing their minds they don't mind acting to the rafters. I like how this movie felt like an overextended Twilight Zone episode. That's not something you see done well in horror movies anymore, and I appreciated it here. There are some bits played for laughs that fell flat for me, but I came away from this movie with a sense of pleasant shock at how good it was for something hanging around at the back end of my Tubi reccomendations.

MAMA - 2013

An old favorite that still holds up really well for me. I'm a big sucker for a good, sad ghost story. The Mama creature effects are a bit dated to today's eyes, but the scares still land. The infamous scene where Mama is finally fully revealed and SPRINTS at the camera ranks as a top ten all time jump scare in my opinion. Guillermo Del Toro's "tragic fairy tale" take on the genre is a personal favorite. I know he has detractors, but it is really nice to see a horror filmmaker have a unique style and a dedication to certain ideas. Plus, kids in peril really resonates with me. The teenager watched this with me and it got his seal of approval, so it must do something right. That kid usually hates everything that isn't a Fortnite streamer.

TURISTAS - 2006

This was a boring retread of Hostel from the golden age of torture flicks that didn't really do much for me. The whole thing really felt like an excuse to get a bunch of soaking-wet and attractive young people together in as little clothing as possible watch them walk around and trade zingers. I gues that there's bit of credit due for being willing to tackle themes as potentially fraught as "traveling is dangerous" and "brown people are dangerous" tropes in your horror film, but there's not much meat on the bone. There's no worse sin in my eyes for a horror film than to be boring, and this is pretty boring despite selling itself as something edgy and interesting. Plus, it really irks me to be put into a position where I have to say that Eli Roth did it better.

LORD OF ILLUSIONS - 1995

Much better. I am an unabashed mark for Clive Barker, and this was a really compelling and fun Clive Barker flick. It's kind of an amalgation of a number of his books where he writes about how magic is real and the people who practice it are fucking dangerous and weird. It felt like we had a sort of a minor golden age in the "supernatural private eye" sub-sub genre in the mid-nineties. This movie really worked for me. It wasn't afraid to just shoot its shot, and just throwing wild ideas at the wall is almost always going to land for me regardless of execution. The effects are super dated, but in a way that I found charming. There's a really sweet nostalgic vibe to the whole thing as well, and when it was done I found myself really wanting to fire up an old point-and-click adventure game on PC like Gabriel Knight or Harvester. This movie felt like a snapshot of a very specific time and place in horror culture, and one that I remember fondly. Perfect sick-day viewing for me.