April 2024

Space Pilot 3000

Author

Chance Shirley
April 08, 2024

Looking for some good (and free!) streaming science fiction movies and TV shows? Me, too! Let’s see what’s out there for April.

Universal Monsters Channel on Pluto TV

Universal has generally been stingy loaning out their monster movies to streaming services. (Universal owns Peacock and usually just shows their monster movies on the Peacock Premium pay service.) So I was excited to see that, at least for the moment, Universal has a Monsters channel on Pluto. So far they seem to be showing movies from their catalog in alphabetical order. Not the most inspired scheduling, but from what I’ve seen there’s plenty of variety, including The Andromeda Strain (1971), The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (1973), some Mummy sequels from the 1940s, Revenge of the Creature (1955), Terror in the Aisles (1984), John Carpenter’s The Thing, Tremors (1990), and even a couple of Hammer films (Brides of Dracula and Night Creatures).

(Thanks to Dave on Bluesky for getting the word out about the Uni Monsters Pluto channel!)

Also on Pluto…

Pluto is has selected episodes of classic Star Trek and selected episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation available on demand, plus a couple of Trek channels.

The Outer Limits is a terrific 1960s sci-fi anthology show.

Mork and Mindy is the 1970s sci-fi sitcom that made Robin Williams a household name.

Have you seen The Faculty (1998) lately? Every time I see it I appreciate it more. It's a terrific Body Snatchers riff with a stacked cast.

Existenz is kind of like Cronenberg’s version of The Matrix. More weird kinky stuff, less guns. (But the guns Existenz does have are weird.)

Night of the Comet is the most totally ’80s sci-fi movie this side of Back to the Future.

X: The Man With X-Man Eyes (1963) is one of the great Roger Corman's greatest flicks.

Plus…

The Thing (1982) on Tubi

John Carpenter’s The Thing is my favorite science fiction movie of all time. And my favorite horror movie of all time. It’s just my all-time favorite film, with a terrific ensemble cast, insane special effects, and an amazing Ennio Morricone score.

The Howard Hawks-produced Thing From Another World (1951) is pretty great, too, and it’s based on the same source material as Carpenter’s movie.

Also on Tubi…

I think there’s some Carpenter influence on Jordan Peele’s instant classic Get Out (2017), so it’s cool that it’s in the Universal catalog with The Thing.

I unabashedly love The Batman (2022). It is, as the kids say, a mood.

James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is a fun and funny superhero flick.

Black Adam (2022) is another relatively recent Warner Bros. comic book movie.

Green Lantern (2011) is not a good movie, but it’s nice that star Ryan Reynolds has a good sense of humor about it.

Ginger Snaps (2000) is low-key one of the best werewolf movies ever.

Alien invaders are evil and also jerks in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks.

Harryhausen works his stop-motion magic for the 1961 adaptation of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island.

Robbie the Robot steals the show in the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet.

Plus…

I was going to link to It Came From Outer Space (1953), but Tubi only has a colorized version of that one, which is just wrong. What the heck, Tubi?

Land of the Lost (1974) on the Roku Channel

Land of the Lost is a lost-world-with-dinosaurs kids’ show from Sid and Marty Kroft, the super-producers who basically ruled Saturday morning television in the 1970s. I’m not going to tell you it’s a great show. But it’s an interesting one, with a unique mixture of shot-on-film stop-motion dinosaurs, shot-on-video live-action, and some wild and weird primitive analog video effects.

Also on the Roku Channel...

Denzel gets post-apocalyptic in The Book of Eli (2010).

Not sci-fi, but I have to mention the 1980s cop show T.J. Hooker because it stars William “James T. Kirk” Shatner himself.

Star Trek fans of a certain age probably have a fondness for, or at least a familiarity with, Space: 1999.

Everybody loves the 1990s Quantum Leap, right?

Ethan Hawke is a reluctant vampire in Daybreakers (2009).

Tommy Lee Jones stars in Black Moon Rising (1986), a supercar heist movie based on a John Carpenter script.

I’m not sure if Alone in the Dark (2005) is sci-fi or fantasy, but it’s kind of infamous for being a very bad movie, so I’m listing it.

Plus...

King Kong (1976) on YouTube

The original Kong is, of course, a stone classic. But I also love the 1976 King Kong remake, which has a great cast and some pretty good giant ape action.

Also on YouTube...

The first Mission: Impossible movie is still one of the series’ best.

Giant robots fight giant monsters in Pacific Rim (2013).

The Ice Pirates has 1980s sci-fi silliness to spare.

Not sci-fi, but the original Psycho is a seminal horror movie, and it’s always nice to see it streaming for free.

Dune Drifter (2020) is a “mockbuster” (of Villeneuve’s Dune, of course), and I had assumed it was made by mockbuster kings the Asylum, but some other folks made it. Regardless, it's a mockbuster, so watch at your own risk.

Pluto Nash (2002) is one of those infamous box office bombs. But I’m gonna watch it one day.

Van Damme gets some kicks in Timecop (1994).

Plus...

The Invisible Man (2020) on Freevee

This modern update of H.G. Welles’ classic story keeps the mad scientist angle and takes it in some unexpected directions. Good stuff, and there’s a jump scare early on that really got me. Well-played, Invisible Man cast and crew!

Also on Freevee...

Freevee has two of the all-time great sci-fi TV shows — The X-Files and The Twilight Zone.

Godzilla movies are, thankfully, pretty easy to find on free streaming services. For example, Freevee has Destroy All Monsters (1968).

Escape From New York is arguably the greatest “B” movie of all time and inarguably my second favorite John Carpenter movie.

Ocean’s Eight (2018) isn’t a sci-fi movie. But it’s a great heist movie, and Cate Blanchett is impossibly cool in it.

As legacyquels go (credit to Matt Singer for coining that term), The Matrix Resurrections (2021) is pretty good.

Spoiler: I hate the ending of The Mist (2007). But the rest of it is pretty good.

Plus...

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) on Kanopy

If this newsletter takes off, at some point I’ll tell you about the time I was camera assistant for Everything Everywhere All at Once director Daniel Scheinert on a short film he made in the early 2000s. I’m really proud of him and his friends for making this excellent movie and winning some Oscars for it!

Also on Kanopy...

David Bowie is The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).

Aliens invade earth in Save Yourselves! (2020).

The great Joseph Cotten stars in Lady Frankenstein (1971) (produced by the great Roger Corman).

Did you know the great graphic designer Saul Bass directed a very good sci-fi movie? It’s called Phase IV, and it’s offbeat and eerie.

Hey! Cool. Another John Carpenter movie! Memoirs of an Invisible Man.

Plus a couple of movies on Hoopla (which, like Kanopy, is library-supported and free for most folks with their local library membership)...

I won’t make it a habit of linking to bootleg or pirate streams. But sometimes a title is out of print or otherwise abandoned by the copyright holder. Such is apparently the case with the Mysterious Island movie serial from 1951. It’s loosely based on the classic Jules Verne book but adds in a lot of wacky 1950s sci-fi elements. I kind of love it and hope to one day find a higher-quality version. But the version I linked to (it’s on YouTube) is totally watchable.

Thanks for Reading!

I think that’s enough links for this “pilot” newsletter. Hopefully I’ve helped you find something fun (and free!) to watch.

That’s the goal of this newsletter, at least. I love all of the free movie and TV streaming options we have these days. Pay services like Hulu and Max are fine (I subscribe to both), but the free services are egalitarian by nature (always a plus in my book), and the free services generally offer a wider variety of programming (new and old, good and bad, critically-acclaimed and generally-forgotten) than the pay services.

But I feel like discoverability on the free streamers should be better. (The same is true for the pay services.) I think that’s at least partly because there are so many TV shows and movies being made these days. Plus, as the TV/film industry gets older, back catalogs grow ever larger. Having so much stuff to watch is wonderful, but digging through it all can be difficult.

My goal with this newsletter is to check out the free stuff at the start of every month (from what I can tell, most streaming deals for a particular show or movie on a particular service run from the start of one month to the end of another) and let you know what I found that I think is worth watching, or is at least noteworthy for one reason or another.

As for limiting the newsletter to science fiction movies and shows, I like a lot of other genres, too. But I have always been particularly fond of sci-fi, and just covering all of the sci-fi out there is a sizable endeavor.

That said, what did I miss? What cool science fiction flick or show that’s streaming somewhere for free should I include in the next issue of the newsletter? If you have any suggestions, please let me know!

And if you dig the Subspace newsletter and think your friends would dig it, please spread the word! They can sign up at https://subspacetv.beehiiv.com.

And if you dig Subspace, or if you don’t dig it, please let me know. One of the reasons I am calling this a “pilot” is I want to see how it goes over. I hope folks find it useful. If they do I’ll try to keep at it.