Tee up Tubi for locally shot masterpieces… and otherwise

If the legendary thriftiness of Winnipeggers is to be believed, it stands to reason that the city’s pennywise denizens would be attracted to a free streaming service like Tubi. It costs nothing, other than the patience required to sit though those godawful Judge Beauty commercials.

But the service holds more specific appeal.

Tubi includes a shocking wealth of good movies that are often difficult to find, either on DVD or other streaming services, such as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps and Alexander Mackendrick’s The Sweet Smell of Success, as well as Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter and Michael Apted’s underrated 1983 thriller Gorky Park.

More importantly, the service is a treasure trove of film, shorts and TV series made in Manitoba.

Like all of Tubi’s offerings, these range from the sublime to the deservedly obscure. (Think of Tubi as a slightly skeevy video store of the ’90s, with its share of classics and more than its share of sleaze.)

In honour of Canadian Film Day on April 17, here’s a sampling of Manitoba-shot movies (and more) currently available on Tubi.

Prestige

Shot in Winnipeg and southern Manitoba in the fall of 2004, Capote was the rare offshore production that actually won an Oscar for the title role by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Future Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty) came to Manitoba in 2001 to shoot scenes for the Russia sub thriller K19: The Widowmaker with Harrison Ford on frozen Lake Winnipeg.

Celebrated homeboy auteur Guy Maddin has a couple of films on Tubi, including The Saddest Music in the World (2003), starring Isabella Rossellini, and Keyhole (2011) starring Jason Patric.

Going way back to 1941, Michael Powell’s 49th Parallel stars Laurence Olivier and Leslie Howard in a thriller about German soldiers trying to sneak into the still-neutral United States from Canada. Manitoba locations include Winnipeg, Elie, Hudson’s Bay and a Hutterite colony.

TV Series

The terrific comedy series Less Than Kind (2008-13), about the troubled Belcher family of Winnipeg, is available in all its dysfunctional entirety.

The single season of the 2008 series House Party, written by Sarah Constible and Matt Kippen, has the novel gimmick of looking at a single out-of-control house party through the eyes of different participants every episode, like Sixteen Candles coupled with Rashomon.

Tubi also features three different reality series, including Ice Vikings, Quest for the Bay and eight seasons of The Winnipeg Comedy Festival.

Comedy

Check out former Winnipegger Collin Friesen’s 2018 dark comedy Sorry for Your Loss, about a bereaved son (Justin Bartha) trying to fulfil a mission to bury his dad’s ashes on the field of his favourite football team.

Rocker Blaine Thurier (the New Pornographers) co-wrote and directed the even darker 2014 comedy Teen Lust, about a guy out to lose his virginity before his Satan-worshipping parents offer his virginal self for sacrifice.

Set in Texas but shot in Manitoba, A Very Sordid Wedding (2017), Del Shores’ sequel to his own Sordid Lives sees women committed to mounting a gay wedding in their moralistic backwater community.

The farcical 2017 crime caper The Hitman Never Dies is about group of assassins descending on the home of a porno producer.

The 2001 comedy A Woman’s a Helluva Thing brought together Angus Macfadyen, Penelope Ann Miller and Ann-Margret for a comedy about a playboy compelled to change his ways. Warning: Unwatchable.

TV Movies

Who knew two different Designing Women came to town to star in two different TV movies? Jean Smart played an FBI agent in Killer Instinct: From the Files of Agent Candice DeLong (2003) and the same year, Annie Potts starred as a mom who set out to trap her daughter’s online predator in Defending Our Kids: The Julie Posey Story.

There’s a who’s who of local actors rubbing shoulders with the likes of Gina Gershon, Randy Quaid and James Brolin in the disaster movie Category 7: The End of the World (2005).

The 2012 docudrama We Were Children essays the horrors of residential schools via re-enactments of witnesses.

Horror

The 2005 revenge thriller Tamara stars Jenna Dewan as a picked-on teen who rises from the dead to avenge herself on her cruel tormentors via gory means.

Directed by Martyrs helmer Pascal Laugier, Incident in a Ghostland (2008) offered up a fractured reality that occurs during a horrific home invasion.

The Divide (2012) is a post-apocalyptic drama in which the survivors of a nuclear holocaust, taking refuge in a fallout shelter, turn against each other.

The young adult thriller I Still See You (2017) takes place in a world where a cataclysm causes a rift where the living world shares the same plain as ghosts. Bella Thorne is a young woman who gets a dire warning from the other side.

The 2015 thriller Dark Forest is an amateurish attempt at the four-female-campers-stalked-by-a-maniac subgenre.

The comparatively inspired, nay, demented 2011 horror comedy Father’s Day comes from the good folks at Astron-6, the Winnipeg collective dedicated to the ‘80s horror esthetic that happens to be well represented on Tubi.

While not technically a Manitoba film, Astron-6 vets Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski are the brains behind the Lovecraftian, Ontario-shot nailbiter The Void (2017).

Local colour

Maddin aside, Tubi has a few proudly local films on view, including the 2019 Winnipeg Film Group existential comedy Tapeworm directed by Fabian Velasco and Milos Mitrovic.

Fight (2012) is a 45-minute NFB documentary by Ervin Chartrand about a high school teacher who tries to help a couple of at-risk students by getting them into the boxing ring.

The Manitoba Connection (2020) is a 35-minute doc celebrating Winnipeg’s punk scene in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Action

Not to be confused with the locally shot 2021 Bob Odenkirk movie Nobody (which is currently available on Netflix) Nobody (2007) is an existential noir thriller about a hitman (Costas Mandylor) apparently being pursued by his last victim.

Black Ice (1992) stars Michael Nouri as a cab driver who decides to help a woman (Joanna Pacula) on the run from assassins. The always entertaining Michael Ironside is in there too.

Drama

Fresh from Breaking Bad, Aaron Paul came to Manitoba to play a fugitive who bonds with a deaf kid in the 2019 drama The Parts You Lose.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays a small-town girl who travels to Chicago to make it big on the burlesque stage in the 2008 dance movie Make It Happen, also starring Tessa Thompson (Avengers: Endgame).

Nicolas Winding Refn’s Lynchian 2005 film Fear X starred John Turturro as a husband investigating the death of his wife. It’s … dismal.

The most scathing review of the film came from Refn himself. “Artistically, it was a failure on all levels,” Refn told the Free Press in a 2016 interview.

“I was too young, too arrogant, too self-absorbed, thinking I could walk on water. And I learned the hard way that wasn’t possible.”

One more caution: There’s a very obscure movie on Tubi titled The Winnipeg Run (1972) starring Lance Henriksen (Aliens) as a troubled Vietnam vet out to heal himself through the miracle of snowmobile racing. But it wasn’t actually shot in Winnipeg.

Apparently it was mostly shot around Thief River Falls, Minn. Reportedly Henriksen himself called his screen debut the worst film he ever made.

randall.king.arts@gmail.com