Tubi is Bringing Back the Guilty Pleasure of Watching Terrible Movies – You Won’t Believe the Classics They’ve Unearthed!

There's a 2008 movie that offers a rare glimpse into today's entertainment. In Michel Gondry's “Be Kind Rewind,” a freak accident degausses the entire inventory of a video rental store, so an employee and his eccentric friend decide to remake all the movies themselves, from “The Lion King” to “Driving Miss Daisy” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Their versions are 20 minutes long (at most), filmed on an old handheld video camera, and produced in a delightfully quirky, ad hoc manner: handmade props and sets, friends working as extras, costumes from the local dry cleaners. They call their tapes “Sweded” and explain the time it takes to supply the films by stating that prints must be imported from Scandinavia. In Gondry's fantasy, the community responds well to this home cinema: not only does demand increase, but store customers begin to participate in the making of the films. Gondry's theory, he said, was that “people would enjoy movies better if they made them themselves.”

Sixteen years later, that democratic spirit is alive and well on Tubi, the cult streaming platform that has become a social media phenomenon. Tubi's library includes many mainstream Hollywood productions, but the company may be best known for its selection of Z movies: movies characterized by outrageously low-budget aesthetics, short running times, horrible acting, and worse special effects. The archetypal “Tubi movie” is like a Swedish film without charm or fantasy. The style recalls a number of beloved cinematic traditions: horror movies, midnight movies, Lifetime dramas, forced '70s erotica, poorly dubbed martial arts movies, Nigerian “Nollywood” thrillers, videotaped plays by Tyler Perry, insipid direct-to-video filler.

Whatever financial resources these directors lack, they make up for with chutzpah.

But boy Are they fun to watch? So deliciously bad they're good. Tubi offers silly movies of all kinds (horror, disaster, vacation, romantic comedy), but the kind that has captivated audiences is something like the self-published “urban fiction” crime novels of the early aughts. Director Silk White “All I want is you 2” is perhaps the most infamous, due to a clip that lit up social media. The sixty-two-minute film stars former Atlanta Real Housewife Claudia Jordan as Chloe. In the scene that went viral, Chloe, who just got out of prison, goes to her former boyfriend's house, only to discover that she has since hooked up with her former parole officer and has had a little daughter. At the climax of this confrontation, Chloe pulls out a gun (where it's unclear) and shoots her ex and her new wife, amidst canned Foley sounds and a post-production visual cloud like something out of a fake animation. by Stan Brakhage. Her daughter, who has just witnessed the murders of her parents, trills that she is “just a girl” and raises her hands in front of her face. A maudlin score emphasizes the emotional stakes. Chloe hesitates. You do not think. In a time of extreme gun violence and school shootings, they surely won't depict this protagonist directly icing a kindergartener. But then Chloe does it, and it's a testament to how cartoonishly bad and unrealistic these movies are (how unseriously they take them) that as fake gun smoke hangs over a dead child's head, the only possible reaction is laugh.