Tubi Treasure Hunt

Yep, this was exactly the kind of brain rot I was looking for. One-of-a-kind dumbass concept, student film level execution, every decision is completely confounding. I don’t even know how to talk about this without just writing a summary of the scenes because everything that happens is insane but also like, nothing happens. After like 20 minutes I had to start taking notes.
So we have our two characters, Julie (great-granddaughter of Walter Lundin, cinematographer for Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last!, relevant) and Josef (great-grandson of William Randolph Hearst, completely irrelevant). Julie is a film student (i think?) trying to get a permit to recreate the clock scene in Safety Last! but she can’t get the permit without revealing the family secret to how the scene was shot. Josef is an anthropology major and just kind of inserts himself into this permit meeting because he seemingly followed her there? Oh also this is a musical and this scene starts with the characters lip-syncing to a royalty-free sounding blues rock song. Also, every establishing shot just has a different spinning 3D model of a planet placed somewhere?? Anyway, after this Julie and Josef leave and start chatting, there’s a lot of them talking and they always walk in a circle while they talk, it’s just a thing that happens idk. Josef starts giving his theories for how the scene was shot but Julie already knows and the answer is that her great-grandmother was actually a Huldra that had an affair with Lloyd and used her powers to turn invisible and float him up to the clock or something. A Huldra is some kind of Scandinavian mythological creature but I didn’t bother looking it up because the movie basically says “no not like that they’re different in America because reasons” so whatever. Julie then reveals that she is also a Huldra and that she can’t have a relationship with a human and Josef is like “nah tho” so they keep chatting and reciting The Cure lyrics to each other. Josef reveals he booked props and a camera to shoot the scene (I do not know when that would have happened) and we get the next musical number which is just them spinning faster while Josef lip-syncs to some pop-punk song.
OK so here comes the first really nuts thing. They go up to the roof of the building they’re shooting on, everything is set but oh no! the clock isn’t in the right position and it’s too high to move. Julie says she could use her Huldra powers to float him up there so he can fix it but that her powers only activate when she’s kissed. This sounds like it could be a cute scene but it’s actually like nightmare fuel. I don’t know if I can convey what’s happening here properly. So the idea is that when her powers activate time and gravity get all f*cky and she turns partially invisible. This is shown with green screen background moving around and jumping to outer space, the handful of shots they got of the characters awkwardly caressing each other glitching around with reversed, warbly speech and dissonant sounds, the “invisibility” effect is just some lines cut out of Julie with the photoshop eraser and its capped off with her yelling “I’m bleeding!!”. Very romantic.
After… whatever that was, they talk more about Huldras. Basically every conversation from this point on is about Huldras and Huldra mechanics, one of said mechanics being that she’s always hungry after using her powers so they go to the mall and that is when we are treated to the cereal song. Our couple pull up to this table with a bunch of different boxes of cereal on it and this guy who looks like a roadie for Motorhead starts explaining the different cereals with a low pitch-shifted voice over some farty synths and busy drums. I literally put my hands on my head I was so bewildered. The guy then pours them some Count Chocula but it’s actually just graham crackers??? Like they did it in close up, was it intentional? Why graham crackers?
After this Julie goes to talk to her sister who reiterates to her that a Huldra can’t be with a human and they have a song about vampire jesus? and from this point on a pattern starts to form. Talk about Huldra, musical number, scary makeout scene. Like pretty much for the rest of the film. They talk about how Huldra powers changed when they came to America, queue remix of the American anthem, they talk about how a Huldra could have come about via evolution, queue song about opposable thumbs? A couple other random notes I’m gonna mention here because I don’t know where else to: Huldras can only have sex in the 3 minutes after their powers are activated (before the bleeding) and only in a church and they get pregnant every time? Walter Lundin killed himself because he couldn’t handle being married to a Huldra which is an insane thing to write given the writer/director is part of this family apparently. Another thing about this being made by someone in the Lundin family, this work is attributed to a “John Lundin” who then seemingly made their self-insert character a girl who has a secret about their identity that specifically makes romance complicated… do you have something you’d like to share with the class “John”? I’m joking of course it’s obviously not that deep, just an observation.
Spoilers this how the movie ends: they go to the beach and Josef starts staring at girls in bikinis and Julie progressively gets more and more upset. She talks to her sister who says she should just kill him next time she goes Huldra mode and then she just does, credit roll. Beast ending honestly followed by like a minute or two of credits repeated for 20. Unbelievable film. Did what the truly peak bad movies do and made me feel like this:

So the first movie I watched for this thread was exactly what I had in mind when I first conceived of the idea and this is almost the complete opposite. Not that its even bad, its totally competent, which is kind of the problem. Like its certainly low-budget still but it feels professional. Big TV movie vibes, like an elevated Goosebumps episode or something. This is just not what I need right now.
As much as I said this is a pretty normal movie it has a pretty wild cold open. We have a man in a plastic suit and latex mask (think the music video for Wynona's Big Brown Beaver by Primus) running from a train shot probably on green screen but has rear-projection vibes and its pretty dark but the colours are really unnatural looking as he runs through this valley. It kinda rocks. Its followed by a dude exploding into 3D polygons and then into salt for plot reasons. Sick honestly, but there's nothing else really wild that happens. There's more creepy model people throughout but it only hits like that the first time.
The story follows August, a 15-year-old boy who works at a model train shop. He has a big crush on Ellen, one of the popular girls at his school. She pops by the store because her little brother hangs out there for some reason and they end up going on a date to see... Retro Puppet Master? OK. Before he meets Ellen for their date though, Mr. Darby, the owner of the shop, gives August access to his crazy, secret model train set as a birthday gift. It seems like an impressive set (we don't see that much of it in detail) and the room looks like a gem cave with the lighting. The lighting throughout is pretty cool, giallo-esque but maybe not quite as vibrant, the whole movie still feels pretty dark. Then he shows his the special train that goes with the set and it looks like Tetsuo the Iron Man's dick.
Later on, August decides to show Ellen the train set and when they both touch the transformer they get Beetlejuiced into it but also a dude comes out of the set, a full-size plastic man. The idea here is that supernatural forces possessed the miniature people and they want out into the human world so they're trying to draw people in to touch the train set so they can swap places with them. The kids try to figure out how to escape, the figures inside the model town as well as the one's that have already gotten out try to capture them so the ritual will work. There's convoluted rules and lore and all that I don't care enough recite. A neat detail is that August is slowly turning into plastic and the model that he swapped with is slowly turning human and a really weird detail is every once in awhile they cut to a The Office style explain what's happening to the camera moment. I genuinely don't understand that.
I'm rushing through this but this is a quality little piece of children's horror. The effects and lighting are good as are the sets inside the model town but I do wish we saw more of them. Cheap and perfectly serviceable with a couple cool things.

Yesterday I watched a short movie about vampires before going in for night shift and today I watched an even shorter movie about vampires before going in for night shift except this movie doesn't have shit to do with vampires lol. This is a new type of Tubi movie, the "not good enough for Vimeo" Tubi movie and honestly I'm here for this genre.
This is one of those faux-art minimalist pieces but without the swagger to convince you of its integrity though it tries to with the Letterboxd description calling it a "multi-media meditation on the vampire" lmao. To be fair I think a lot of the perceived validity of a piece of art comes down to how well you can sell it and knowing that it's charming to see something just boldly and transparently lie. Bro just wanted to film a hot girl in a leather bodysuit and f*ck around in Final Cut.
So the plot, if you can call it that, is that the titular Space Vampire (I guess?) comes down from the heavens, breaks into someone's house and kills them like walks around downtown and showers. Just kind of vaguely kind of whispering to you "hey remember Under the Skin? that was a cool movie".

The perfect antithesis to Tubi's outward visage. A shark movie with no shark and bold enough to declare as much in the title. Tubi is built on the backs of thousands of sharks and the movies about them and this film proudly stands in defiance in the results of a search bar reading "shark".

The most popular film I've covered so far as it actually has enough data to have an average rating display on Letterboxd is so simple and uneventful I'm definitely gonna be padding the word count and arguably already am. The film follows Chase, a self-described "10", and her inner monologue as she goes from beach to beach in hopes of being eaten by a shark presented in twelve vignettes. Each vignette basically just involves her sitting on the beach, having some kind of interaction with a person or people there.

The poster has a sticker on it that reads "Angsty and Existential" and that's accurate as the monologue we hear throughout the film is and endless flow of c*nty mean girl philosophical dictations. She quickly horseshoe theories from bad bitch to just bitch but eventually you end up getting sucked into it though as the nastiness starts to just wash over you as its spoken so calmly and confidently. There are moments where you can tell its written by a dude and it doesn't hit right but there's still plenty of moments that resonate as well and some lines that really nail the cringe that comes with an edgelord character like this like comparing Jaws to Birth of a Nation and Triumph of Will because of how it propagandized people against sharks.
The whole movie is that monologue though so there's not much else to talk about unless I start describing all the girls in bikinis standing around on these gross looking New York beaches. I don't even think there's any music, just bitchy thoughts for nearly 2 hours. It kind of rules though and it actually takes a fun twist at the end. Probably not the last Cody Clarke film that will show up in this thread.