TUBI TIME (among other, lesser streaming services) - Weekend Chores Edition

It has become my custom to watch Tubi on my phone while the kids watch their programs and play their video games on the TV. Sometimes I'll start two or three movies at a time and switch them around as I'm doing laundry or cooking dinner through the week. Does this make it hard to follow the plots? Am I missing critical subtext? Disrupting the flow of the narrative? These aren't those kinds of movies, baby. I usually start 4-5 movies on a Monday afternoon and wrap all them sumbitches up by Sunday night. And it's Sunday night. And I ain't going to church. Where we're going, we don't need plots.

ROME, ARMED TO THE TEETH aka THE TOUGH ONES (1976)

If you ever wanted to watch Will Ferrell beat the shit out of The Strokes, then boy do I have good news for you! The opening credits established this early on as very much my kinda thing. That funky score! The fonts! The car chases! What we have here is your usual psychopathic cop driven by the urge to do violence to crooks. So he does. Then the crooks kidnap his liberal girlfriend and threaten to toss her into a car compactor. Things escalate from there in typical Italian grindhouse fashion. All of the crooks seem to be physically handicapped in some way, and our hero is a monstrous asshole. The streets run red with marinara. It's fun!

MUNCHIES (1987)

What was the deal with 80s B-movie culture shitting on 50s kitsch? You see that a lot. It isn't enough to make fools of their boomer parents, but these 80s guys had to keep turning them into these weird over-the-top parodies with massive beehive haircuts and pink Cadillacs. Anyway, this is Gremlins ripoff #147. It's kinda funny in parts, but not in any of the ways the filmakers intended. The main protagonist is an insufferable wannabe stand up comedian with a fluffy mullet and jokes ripped off from every Star Search 2nd runner up you ever saw. The gremliny munchie monsters act like a gaggle of 8th boys on coke. They can talk, and they use stupid accents and have an endless supply of terrible one-liners while they menace people playing mini golf. This is probably what it was like to hang out with Dave Coulier in 1989. I make it sound more terrible then it really is, but MUNCHIES is pretty tepid. It is, however, colorful, amusingly dated, and energetic. You might have a good time with it playing in the background while you're stoned and doing something else at the same time.

THE DEEP HOUSE (2020)

Imagine a haunted house, but underwater! That's the gimmick. And it's good! This movie seems to follow the Stephen King school of creativity, where you start off with a cool "what-if" idea (what if a St. Bernard got rabies? What if you got snowed in at a haunted hotel? Etc.) and build a plot around it. This movie does exactly what you want it to do based on the premise. It's exciting, it doesn't overstay its welcome, and the lore-discovery phase is entertaining enough to get us into the jump-scare phase without showing ass. It's a lean, mean machine and a good way to blow 90-ish minutes. I suffer from a touch of Thalassophobia and I am a lifelong sucker for spooky underwater shit, so I caught a buzz off this movie. Good stuff!