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May 2024

May 2024

On YouTube, no one can hear you scream

Chance Shirley
May 08, 2024

YouTube isn’t the first service I think of for free movies. (YouTube doesn’t even show up on the generally useful JustWatch app/website.) But their in-house “YouTube Movies & TV” channel features some good science fiction films on occasion. And May is looking like a particularly good month for sci-fi on YouTube.

Alien on YouTube

I was lucky to catch Alien while it was playing theaters last week to celebrate its 45th anniversary. It still looks (and sounds!) great on the big screen, and it ain’t too shabby on your TV (or laptop or iPad or whatever) either. I could go on and on about this movie, but I assume if you like science fiction, you’ve already seen it. If you haven’t seen it, stop reading right now and get over to YouTube and check it out. If you have seen Alien, please continue reading and enjoy a free re-watch of Alien on YouTube later.

(Bonus: a few comments from the great Bill Hader on Alien.)

Also on YouTube…

As 1950s monster movies go, It! The Terror From Beyond Space is hard to beat — it’s basically the 1950s version of Alien. I mean, Alien is basically the 1970s version of It! The Terror From Beyond Space.

(Bonus: a TCM intro to It! The Terror From Beyond Space featuring the great Robert Osborne.)

The Land That Time Forgot is a lost-world-with-dinosaurs movie based on the book of the same name by Edgar Rice Burroughs (yes, the guy who invented Tarzan).

Contagion is a solid 2011 pandemic thriller from Steven Soderbergh. Post-COVID, it plays as eerily prescient.

Speed Racer is a colorful, kinetic, occasionally psychedelic adaptation of the classic kids’ cartoon made by the creators of The Matrix.

A few classic Universal horror movies are free-with-ads on YouTube, including Frankenstein (1931), The Invisible Man (1933), and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943).

How am I just now hearing about Absolutely Anything, the 2017 sci-fi movie with Simon Pegg and Kate Beckinsale?

James Cameron has made plenty of great movies, but for my money, The Terminator is still the best.

Plus…

Aquaman on Tubi

Who thought they would ever turn Aquaman into a pretty cool movie superhero? I certainly didn’t see that coming. And I say this as a huge fan of the old 1970s/1980s Super Friends cartoons, which prominently featured the breaths-underwater-and-talks-to-fish guy.

I found the DC superhero movies of the last few years to be hit-and-miss at best, but Jason Momoa’s fun turn as Aquaman was a highlight of any movie he showed up in. Including, obviously, the 2018 Aquaman movie.

Also on Tubi…

Species (1995) is basically Contact-meets-Alien. It’s generally ridiculous, but the cast is stacked (Forest Whitaker! Alfred Molina!), so I can’t not recommend it.

Speaking of ridiculous movies with top-notch casts, The Fifth Element is also on Tubi. Aside from being a lot of fun, The Fifth Element is also one of the last big sci-fi movies of the analog/pre-CGI era.

Idiocracy is a brutally funny satire about a future where everybody is very, very dumb. Sadly, that future seems more and more likely every day.

I was excited to see Hangar 18 when it came out in 1980. I was hoping for something Star Wars-ish, but it’s a lot more like The X-Files, with the U.S. government covering up a flying saucer incident. Then I got to see the movie again when it played on TV, but it took me a while to realize it was my second viewing because they re-titled the movie Invasion Force for the TV airing.

Alligator (1980) is kind of like Jaws-in-the-sewers with Robert Forster in the lead role and a John Sayles screenplay. That is to say, it’s awesome.

As bombastic sci-fi movies from the producer/director team of Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich and go, I don’t think Stargate is as good as Independence Day, but it does have Kurt Russell and James Spader, and it’s probably better than the Devlin/Emmerich Godzilla movie from 1998.

I recently wrote about The People That Time Forgot for my pal Jeremy’s very cool newsletter, Dust on the VCR. So you can read Jer’s newsletter for my comments on the movie after (or before if you want — I didn’t include many spoilers) you watch it on Tubi. (By the way, this movie is the sequel to The Land That Time Forgot that I mentioned above in the YouTube section.)

I didn’t know till today that “B” movie king Roger Corman made a killer-cockroach movie based on the cult classic killer-cockroach book The Nest. But now I know, and I am looking forward to watching it.

I was lucky that I got to see Underwater (2020) in theaters. There wasn’t a lot of marketing or buzz for the movie, which is a shame, because it’s a really good science fiction flick, and it’s original, not based on a comic book or video game or whatever. It starts as a disaster movie and turns into a monster movie, and it handles both genres deftly.

Professor Quatermass is a classic British science fiction character, and Hammer Film made three Quatermass movies. As you might guess, Quatermass 2 from 1957 is the second in the series, and it’s about the good professor uncovering an alien invasion.

Tubi is currently featuring two Ghostbusters movies, the 1984 original and the 2016 reboot.

This one is probably more fantasy than sci-fi, but History of the Occult looks like it might be the Argentinian version of the recent Late Night With the Devil.

Plus…

Johnny Mnemonic on Pluto TV

Before he was in the groundbreaking and iconic cyberspace movie The Matrix, Keanu Reeves was in another cyberspace movie, Johnny Mnemonic. It’s not as huge a movie as The Matrix, but it is based on a story by William Gibson, the dude who basically invented cyberspace with his book Neuromancer in 1984.

Also on Pluto…

Southland Tales was pretty much a bomb when it originally came out. I managed to catch it during its brief theatrical run and originally considered it a hot mess. Over the years I’ve grown to kind of love the movie. (And if it’s a hot mess, it’s also an interesting mess.)

Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind is only the second biggest science fiction movie of 1977. But considering that Star Wars is in the top spot, second place is pretty good in this case.

I’ve been a fan of Disney’s The Black Hole since I was a kid. I’ve occasionally thought about how I might remake that movie. But I might just end up making Event Horizon, which is kind of the grown-up, more horrific version of The Black Hole.

James Caan stars in Rollerball (1975), a near-future satire about pro sports and the corporatization of everything.

Plus…

The Hunt on Freevee

A secret society of the rich and powerful hunt humans for sport in The Hunt. It’s a solid thriller, elevated by an incendiary lead performance from Betty Gilpin.

Also on Freevee…

Betty Gilpin also shows up in Amazon’s big-budget sci-fi action flick The Tomorrow War, but she is sadly underutilized in that one.

I mentioned Amazon’s Fallout show in the previous newsletter. I like it enough that I bought the Fallout 4 video game, even though I am terrible at video games. Anyway, I am happy to report that Fallout is still streaming on Freevee, and it’s worth a look. (And Fallout 4 is fun, even though I am definitely not good at it.)

Freevee is currently offering several of the dystopian Purge movies, including The Forever Purge from 2021.

Plus…

That’s a Wrap for Now…

…and I didn’t even get to Hoopla or Kanopy or the Roku Channel! So much sci-fi, so little time. Which is a good problem to have.

That said, if you have a favorite science fiction movie or show that I didn’t include that is streaming on one of the free-with-ads services, let me know and I’ll include it in the mid-May issue of the Subspace newsletter.

Thanks for reading!