Tubi's secret history of film

There was a time when storefront video stores popped up, some seemingly overnight, across America. Beverly Hills Cop, Back to the Future and Top Gun brought in the traffic, but it was the weird stuff among their VHS inventory that often made these stores unique. We frequented a video store that included the 1975 Nazi-exploitation flick Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, and the barely remembered, and barely animated, Spunky and Tadpole cartoons. Their sun-faded boxes indicated they’d been sitting near the front window for a while and would remain there for some time to come.

Tubi is the ultimate mom-and-pop video store with endless shelves (more than 250,000 titles) of weather-worn B-movies, public domain television shows and drive-in fodder. Sometimes the prints are terrible – you almost expect the virtual projector to begin sputtering and the film to burst on fire – but there’s immediate, incredible variety and even if they don’t currently offer Ilsa or Spunky, a chance to finally view movies that for decades seemed to only be rumors (Candy, Chatterbox, Wonderwall).

Here are a few highlights from some recent Tubi viewing.

A joke that made the rounds in third grade concerned the first encounter between Tarzan and Jane. I’ll cut right to the punchline: “If I stick my plug in your socket, will your headlights turn on?” The level of humor in Carry On Camping (1969) isn’t quite that low, but it’s close.

Essentially a 90-minute Benny Hill skit of double entendres, sight gags, horny husbands and giggling virgins, it was the U.K.’s most popular box office movie in 1969, the seventeenth entry in the Carry On series, which ran from 1958 to 1992. The actors seem mostly unknown outside of the U.K., including the effete, reptilian Charles Hawtrey, the subject of a John Lennon ad lib on the Let It Be album (“I Dig a Pygmy by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf-Aids”).

Charles Hawtrey 

Carry On Camping includes a sub-plot about a nudist camp, triggering an algorithm recommending Hideout in the Sun (1960). Brothers Duke and Steve Martin rob a bank, take Dorothy as a hostage, then hide in the “country club” where she works. Turns out it’s a nudist camp. While Duke sweats and smokes endless cigarettes, Steve and Dorothy swim, play volleyball and archery naked as the other campers (mostly women) innocently frolic and strike poses. Steve remarks that he’s never felt healthier.

Filmed in Miami, Duke eventually dies from a cobra bite at a roadside snake farm and Steve gives himself up, promising Dorothy to return for a shared lifetime of nude volleyball.

Somehow James Guercio, who’d produced Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Chicago, landed a gig directing Electra Glide in Blue (1973) starring Robert Blake as a motorcycle cop, a film with the same flaws of posturing and self-importance that made Chicago so hard to stomach. Blake aside, the acting is overblown, given to long, embarrassing scenes that recall high school drama class exercises. The finale, in which Blake is shot off his motorcycle by two hippies in some sort of reverse reference to the end of Easy Rider, stretches out forever as the camera ever-so-slowly pans down the highway.

It’s the sort of excess you’d expect from someone who allowed Chicago to make three of its first four records double albums.