In Defense of Tubi

Tubi or not Tubi? That is not the question, as that is the kind of referential, pun-driven “wit” that has ruined comedy in the internet age. Regardless of this article's inane intro, some readers might still be wondering if the Tubi TV app is worth downloading. The answer is yes—if you like to watch trash with ads intermixed.

That is not an attempt at acerbic wit or irony. Rather, I am earnestly recommending Tubi to people who like movies and TV that are so bad they are good . . . or just bad.

Perhaps most notably, Tubi boasts an excellent lineup of bad horror movies. Here you can find classics such as The Hills Have Eyes and the Rob Zombie movies, most notably House of 1000 Corpses. There is no shortage of obscure slashers, such as Slaughter High, Final Exam, House on Sorority Row, The Mutilator, and Don't Go in the Woods. There's also a cornucopia of exploitation horror—that is, the real nasty and relentless grindhouse fare such as Nightmare (a.k.a. Nightmare in a Damaged Brain) and the seminal gore films of Herschell Gordon Lewis such as 2000 Maniacs. And while Tubi features hundreds of crappy independent horror films made in the last few years, including unwatchable fare like Don’t F*** in the Woods, there are also some gems. Check out, for instance, Terrifier and tell me that Art the Clown isn't more terrifying than Pennywise and Captain Spaulding combined. All told, Tubi is a crash-course in horror and exploitation.

Tubi must also be praised for its junky science-fiction. Crappy schlock classics such as The Astro Zombies, War Beneath the Earth, and Battle of the Planets can all be found here, among hundreds of others.

For years, many of the aforementioned films were nigh impossible to find on Blu-Ray or even DVD, and so a person like me would find themselves searching YouTube for bootlegs. Sometimes people like me even had to resort to downloading illegally from seedy sites like Rarelust. But not anymore, now that I've found Tubi.

For the non-horror and sci-fi fan, there's a lot of other compelling material on Tubi that could never go mainstream. Take, for instance, Pro Gay Wrestling, a non-heteronormative wrestling federation. I love the idea and a lot of the storylines—most notably the heel wrestler who swears he's not gay—but a lot of the quality of the wrestling itself is subpar. There's also a healthy serving of obscure cartoons from yesteryear. Any JEM fans among our readers? If so, you've got a date with nostalgia on Tubi.

Tubi lets you have all of this for free, but there is, of course, an ostensible catch. Tubi has ads interlarded within the programming, and this has been enough to make consumers look askance at this service. After all, it's just classier to pay for Netflix, Paramount, Amazon Prime, and Disney Plus and not watch ads, right? Ads are so prole. Or are they? There are only three or four commercial breaks in any given Tubi movie, far fewer than on conventional television. Moreover, these commercials don't run as long as on television, meaning they're relatively unobtrusive. This may not eliminate the nightmare kaleidoscope of a typical commercial break completely, but it can at least mitigate the horror by making it less kaleidoscopic. That said, it's still a bit jarring to be watching Art the Clown bisect a buxom naked blonde woman with a bandsaw and then have Tubi cut to a commercial for Barbie-licensed Little People.

In many ways, Tubi is upstream from the paid services. In fact, Tubi seems to be capable of setting new trends. Just recently, Netflix has offered cheaper subscription tiers that feature some advertising. While Netflix might have “better” programming (“better” meaning overcooked dialogue and labyrinthine, recursive plots, in the view of the average middle-class viewer), Tubi still has a lock on cost-free streaming. Given the sad state of the economy and its attendant skyrocketing inflation, I think we're going to need more services like Tubi. Tubi is the food bank of entertainment.

(This image is property of 20th Century Fox, while the Tubi corporate logo is property of Tubi, Inc.
These properties are used here strictly for purposes of parody.)

As a schlock and horror fan, I give Tubi my highest recommendation. Tubi is the place to watch old horror and exploitation and sci-fi. You can call me a shill, but does someone really qualify for that moniker when no money has been exchanged? Sure, Tubi is trashy and quintessentially lower-middle class. It's not a prestige subscription by any stretch. And “Tubi and chill” just doesn't sound nearly as sexy. But it's free, and all it will cost you is time. So while it might be embarrassing to introduce Tubi to your friends, what with their sleek, voluptuous Netflix and Disney Plus subscriptions, just remember—they're the ones paying for services rendered.

Bea Priestley: An Appreciation

[B]osom heaving, her eyes flashing [...] [s]he was slender, yet formed like a goddess: at once lithe and voluptuous. [...] Her rich black hair, black as a Stygian night, fell in rippling burnished clusters [...] Her dark eyes burned [...]. She was untamed as a desert wind, supple and dangerous as a she-panther.

- Robert E. Howard

1.

You likely haven't heard of her, yet you know her already. You want to have known her. She's that girl with the Kool-Aid-colored hair smoking cigarettes at the school's rear entrance.

She is Queen of the Black Coast and beyond. Robert E. Howard couldn't have conjured a more consummate vamp, not in his most vivid, virginal reverie, not in his spiciest of stories. The epigraph above does her little justice. H. Rider Haggard could have done little more to comprise her, though with his sorceress Ayesha—the eponymous “She” from his famed novel—he draws nearer.

She hails from Wellington, NZ, by way of London. She bills herself the "Top Gaijin." At its most euphemistic, “Gaijin” translates from Japanese as "foreigner." At its most xenophobic, "Gaijin" can be rendered "outsider" or "alien." She is outside, yes, but also far above.

Her signature finish is the electric chair suplex. She calls it the "Queen's Landing," and with good cause. One of the most ascendant male wrestlers in the world is her male suitor, and she and he seem apt heirs apparent for wrestling royalty.

The "She" in question is Bea Priestley, grossly underappreciated wrestler for whom I am now about to attempt an appreciation.

2.

You might mock professional wrestling, and you are mostly justified in doing so. The wrestling you've glimpsed briefly and dismissed, perhaps while flipping channels, is all defined by some measure of compromise. There is little compromise in Bea Priestley.

She's all flailing mop and tomboyish stomps, each unpitying boot a flash of checkerboard patterns and leopard-skin prints. She has a swashbuckling swagger, jaw perpetually working with an insouciance, her sneer painted in greenish-black under jagged bangs. Without fail, that sneer gives way to a pout so pronounced it's nearly jejune. In between it all, she freely dispenses her middle-finger with arm held out at full span.

I saw her holler "fuck off" at a male fan who wolf-whistled as she exuviated her entrance robe. With that, I fell hard into her fandom.

3.

I think a lot about Bea Priestley's bumps. They have such force and gravity. They are unrelenting. They paralyze the gaze. Her bumps inspire. Her bumps titillate. Her bumps look so painful, yet they ease my pain.

I once saw a bump of Bea's where her head was caught up in a chair and then the face she was facing kicked her stiffly sans abandon (see below). I once saw Bea Priestley take multiple head-bumps, including two Tower Hacker Bombs, in a match against Kagetsu in Japan. The internet saw her take an inter-gender kick to the face from Ricochet. Bea Priestley deals in pain so expertly, log-rolling on the canvass, shag of hair roiling, gripping her brain-pan in both palms, selling the hallowed rear-blow-to-head bump.

I watch her bumps and I ache for Bea Priestley. Can't the majority audience, the common public, see what Bea's putting herself through? Can't the talent scouts see what they're missing out on? I ask these questions like these matches aren't widely available on YouTube, like they don't have hundreds of thousands of views. Hundreds of those views are mine, as I can't take my eyes off her bumps.

At this juncture, I should clarify for the non-wrestling fan that, in the wrestling business, "bumps" refer to choreographed landings.

4.

Bea's breakout bout, arguably, was her Last Woman Standing match in which she faced Nixon Newell for the WCPW Women's Championship. You may know Newell as "Tegan Nox," her moniker in NXT, WWE's "gold brand."

Newell, playing the face, came out sweet and enthusiastic and insipid. Newell's given middle-name is Rhiannon, so we must assume that the "Nixon" in her ring name is a Stevie Nicks homage. Any kindred linkage with Nicks, even tangential and/or unconscious, solidifies "crowd-pleaser" status. And Bea quickly established herself as the heartless challenger to the Gold Dust Woman.

Bea Priestley did not merely play the heel; rather, she epitomized it. She entered as the sour-faced silicone Valkyrie, in kick-pad boots and a carapace-like bikini that looked très impractical for pro wrestling.

Of course, Bea and Newell did not wrestle in any conventional sense. From the outset of the match, Bea wielded a kendo stick as liberally as she did her middle finger, dealing out many a thwack to the fawn-faced Newell.

The eroticized nature of the beating was never lost on the mostly male crowd or on Bea. At one point, Bea took the liberty of licking Newell across the face before slapping her with an open palm. The homology drawn by these consecutive indignities was virtuosic, both the tongue and the slap like unto a paintbrush across Newell's face.

Bea would eventually bring steel chairs into the ring in the promise of a massive, maleficent spot to finish the match. She would be hoisted by her own petard. Newell grabbed back the momentum and German-suplexed Bea onto the chair. It was this chair into which Bea's head was fed, and here (all kayfabe aside) where Bea laid dutifully on her cheek such that Newell could curb-stomp her ala Seth Rollins and then, only then, veritably Pillmanize Bea Priestley via an unprotected kick to the face. How many male wrestlers would take that bump?

Of course, the referee's count climbed to ten and Nixon Newell was the winner. She would go on to NXT, to be given her new name, and to flounder in the gears of the WWE machine, one among many gold dust women who would have their illusions shattered by that corporate entity and its capricious septuagenarian overlord, that reverse-alchemist who unfailingly makes lead from gold.

But Bea Priestley's name, by contrast, became elemental and immutable from that evening onward.

5.

I like Bea Priestley because she is not easy to like. She is a challenge. There is an offensive quality inhering within her. At times, her in-ring work verges upon appearing unworkable. In each gesture, she betrays some measure of disdain for the pageantry surrounding the pseudo-sport of wrestling itself.

She gives no indication of caring what the fans think. It is as if we the fans were chewing gum to be gnashed and spat out (or perhaps, once thoroughly chewed, placed in an opponent’s mouth, a tactic Bea used to intensify a camel clutch in one of her battles with Newell).

Unsurprisingly, Bea Priestley turned down an early WWE contract offer. Bea Priestley is not clay to be shaped. But alas—and, surprisingly—even the relatively progressive shores of All Elite Wrestling couldn't keep her moored. She was too talented and too jaded for WWE—that goes without saying—but even AEW, a company built on being the alternative, could not fully apprehend her acumen. For it must be said that AEW, for all the good it has done, is built in no small measure on fan-service. Bea Priestley is not there to render services for the fans.

Bea Priestley's talent is not in her promos. (She sounds one-half Valley Girl, one-half Cockney bootblack, and tends to get caught up in cursing.) And though her in-ring work is solid, this is not the locus of her talent, either. Her talent is her presence. A buxom woman with green lipstick is going to strut down the ramp with a wide and manly swagger, as if making way for comically large testes, and then is going to work stiff. Just ask brittle Britt Baker, whose skull fell victim to Bea Priestley’s rumbustious boot. (I say this not to take anything away from Dr. Baker, whose recent "Lights Out" match with Thunder Rosa marked a tidal shift for women's wrestling.)

Bea Priestley does not map on to any recognizable wrestling archetype. She is indeed Top Gaijin, but not just in Japan. She is an outlander in any federation or confederacy. She is a feral, strong-style mercenary in a milieu of fake fights.

Bea Priestley could be a female Bruiser Brody. This is both high praise and a death warrant.

6.

When grown men wax literary about female celebrities, the reader can safely presume the male author is having some sort of sexual fantasies about said celebrity women. Indeed, Norman Mailer wrote an entire volume about a decades-dead Marilyn Monroe that was rather frank in its sexual reveries.

Vis-à-vis Bea Priestley, this is not the case for me. Rather, in my fantasies, I call to mind a world in which Bea Priestley and I are, like, acquaintances at best. I spend a lot of our time together fawning over the high spots and head-drops in her matches. She is not forthcoming with chitchat, but she mostly talks about how busy it is being on the road in four continents, and about the challenges of maintaining a romantic relationship within the business. Sometimes, I mention my own dating woes—the lack of dates one presumes of men who write lovingly about female celebrities—and Bea Priestley sneers and says "well then try getting your fat fucking arse to a gym."

"Oh, Bea," I then say. (And this is also a Norman Mailer reference; cf. Mailer: His Life and Times, p. 72. The first of Mailer's six wives (a) was also named Bea and (b) was also foul-mouthed.)

To make this fantasy world even remotely plausible, in it I am necessarily employed in the pro-wrestling industry. I picture I am Bea Priestley's manager, my hit-or-miss articulateness subbing in for her mediocre mic skills. I berate her scheduled opponent, and then she finishes the pre-match segment by berating me. I refer to her as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. The commentators speculate as to our relationship, the persistent question in this fantasy world being: am I Bea Priestley's gimp? It's obvious to everyone this relationship can't possibly be romantic, and would still be obvious even if she wasn't involved with Will Ospreay.

7.

If you want to see the future of wrestling and romantic relationships, you must watch Bea Priestley versus Will Ospreay. A boyfriend vs. girlfriend match may smack of exploitative fluff, for this was certainly the precedent set by WWE in less progressive times (cf., for instance, Marc Mero vs. Sable). Some may dismiss Priestley vs. Ospreay as desperate content creation from the early COVID-19 era. But it is not to be dismissed. It is arguably a five-star match.

Priestley takes to the ring with ratty Kool-Aid colored pig-tails swishing, a bad-ass Raggedy Ann in laced tights and a halter top. Ospreay has more flash and gasconade. But Bea Priestley slaps that gasconade off Ospreay's face early on with many a resounding shoot-style strike, and the beau quickly sheds his self-assured smile.

In due course, Priestley takes a resounding slap to the chest. Ospreay begins to assert his size advantage, playing to every conservative’s expectations.

But then Priestley turns the tides with what is possibly the best DDT ever executed onto the ring apron—the hardest part of the ring (if you ignore the posts). As her male suitor staggers to his feet on the ringside mats, Priestley follows up with a double foot-stomp to the back. Flying from the turnbuckle to the outside, she looks every bit Belît, Howard's "wildest she-devil unhanged." Yet her exit route leaves her with no choice but to take an excruciating back bump on the floor. After this, moaning and almost in tears with pain, she manages to get her boyfriend back in the ring to score a near-fall.

Of course, Ospreay charges back, and soon enough he's hooked Bea's arms and secured her shaggy mop between his legs so as to presage the Storm Breaker, his A-level finisher. And then, even after all the beating she has taken, Bea counters the Storm Breaker into a Code Red. And then when Ospreay goes to his other A-level finisher, the Os-Cutter, Bea counters with a bottom-rope-aided German suplex. This is all fantastic.

So now Ospreay has to resort to his A+ finisher, his top-tier signature move, the rarely seen "Hidden Blade." It is only after he succeeds with this glorified knife-edge chop that he is able to execute the Storm Breaker and score the pinfall. The Storm Breaker—that double underhook corkscrew neckbreaker—strikes me now as the truest consummation of a relationship.

The match could be five-stars. It loses at least a half-star, however, for Ospreay's male-gazing contemplation of Priestley’s felled, face-down body, and his subsequent consideration of grabbing some sweet. Thankfully, he thinks better of it, but even the mere ideation of a goosing takes the match down a notch.

Yet the match we have just watched cannot be reduced to a mere gazing and enumerating of stars. What we have witnessed obviates words, attesting to what is really the most transcendent intercourse: to meet your significant other in a choreographed fight. This is what a romantic relationship should culminate in. The goal of coupling is not a happy, long-lived marriage or, I don't know, a quasi-mystical sexual encounter. Rather, it is a worked, twenty-plus minute battle, and a strong-style fight at that.

This is love. And due to a raging plague, no one got to see it live.

8.

I've thought a lot about women I've loved or could have loved, and I've dreamed of strong-style bouts with them. Would I put them over? How would I get myself over? Would they put me over? How would I bump for them? Would I let them roll me up in the highest of high-stack pinfalls? Even if you don't let them beat you, you must make your lover look good.

9.

There are several female celebrities I greatly admire. These include Lana Del Rey, Stevie Nicks, Serena Grandi (Italian b-movie luminary, FYI), and, what the hell, we'll throw Amanda Seyfried in there too. I've considered writing long-form pieces about all of these people (with the exception of Seyfried), but in the end I chose to write about Bea Priestley. Why? Because I imagined—as all people who write about people they admire but will never meet must—the person being written about somehow actually reading the work. 

In the above cases, there is the possibility, admittedly slim, that the person in question could like what I wrote about them. But Bea Priestley is the outlier. There's not going to be some personalized tweet about how "you're so sweet." Bea Priestley does not give a fuck what I think and would appear to be wholly incapable of ever giving a fuck what I think. All of my above praises would matter no more to her than that male-gazing Britisher who wolf-whistled at her lissome body as she bared it. 

And I admire that complete disdain for the fan. Because the fan is ultimately a spectator partaking in something altogether lower than watching or observing or gazing. They watch with empty-headed expectation of being entertained. This is, for lack of a better term, "spectation." Fans are defined by their maniacal commitment to observing exalted others in this way. That Bea Priestley hates this makes me like her all the more. 

Because I hate being a fan of anything or anyone. It pains me that, as someone who believes that what he thinks is worth writing down, I would even consider writing about any of the aforementioned celebrities. Their talents do not make them exalted or transcendent. Our worship for the marketing of their talents is what keeps them afloat, and this worship makes us so irredeemably common, insofar as we would accept such a low standard for transcendence. 

Bea Priestley's thesis, if she has one, is almost an argument against spectating itself. This, to my mind, makes her wrestling's perfect heel.

10.

That is Bea, that is Belît. The name bewilders you and so you dismiss it, you forget it.

I whisper that name like a prayer, while I pray that Bea Priestley will not be the female Bruiser Brody, that she will not end up as wrestling's Marilyn Monroe. I pray that all her bumps will land true, and that her stingers, when they happen, will heal and feeling will return even fuller than before. I pray that one day some promotion will see that there is something generational, something elemental, something eternal in Bea Priestley. I pray that you will all see this much, and feeling will return to you, too.

Rumor has it that Bea Priestley is headed to NXT, that most palatable tentacle of WWE. Specifically, she'll be in NXT UK, a tameless outlander shoehorned back into her ostensible home. When I hear this, I feel that strange mix of exultation and envy one experiences when a friend has some success. I also feel sorry for her. Because I doubt that WWE can ever truly know Bea Priestley.* Indeed, that feeling she embodies is so subtle, so rarefied, I fear that the WWE creative team cannot fathom it, let alone capture it in the ring.

I mean that feeling that high school's over, and school’s out forever, but still you know She is still there, still smoking at the rear entrance, and that She always will be. You don't know her, but you realize in time that you want more than anything to have known her.

---

Footnotes:

*Update, July 4, 2021: As could be expected, WWE has rebranded Bea Priestley, settling upon the name "Blair Davenport." While certainly maintaining the Britishness of Priestley's given name, WWE Creative has erred on the side of posh British rather than the hard-bitten British of the original. It's some consolation, I suppose, that the last syllable of "Davenport" does maintain Priestley's littoral associations (e.g. her mastery of the "Japanese Ocean" suplex). Still, I personally find that something is lost when someone submits themselves to a pseudonym. 

AEW Fight for the Fallen

“This is great pro wrestling, because the fans are loving this.” These were the words of All Elite Wrestling commentator Jim Ross and, though the man possesses at least some bias in that he works for the company, they adequately characterized AEW’s July super-card Fight for the Fallen. In spite of a few hiccups, Fight for the Fallen reclaimed some dignity for professional wrestling, both in the ring and out.

Most of the matches impressed, especially the tag team contests. Early on in the card, a three-way tag match featuring the Dark Order (Evil Uno and Stu Grayson), Anjelico and Jack Evans, and the team of Luchasaurus and Jungle Boy, set a sizzling, spot-happy pace. It was hard to keep up with the innovative offense, which featured, among other maneuvers, a choke suplex, a Black Tiger turnbuckle bomb, and a double-team Gory Special into a Diamond Cutter. This latter maneuver won the match for the Dark Order. A more conventional tag match between the Lucha Brothers and SoCal Uncensored (Frankie Kazarian and Scorpio Sky) also offered up moves far too adept for WWE programming. The Lucha Brothers successfully executed a top-rope Canadian Destroyer, a rapid, rope-aided solebutt, and a stomp-capped double-team package piledriver (for the win).

Portrait of the artist as a young (Omega) man

Singles action did not disappoint, either. AEW Championship contender Hangman Page pounded Kip Sabian with, among other super-moves, a bridging pump-handle suplex, a backdrop onto the apron, and a powerbomb onto the ramp before pinning him with an Ax Guillotine Driver. Nonetheless, the highlight of the match came when Sabian silenced an elderly, ornery fan at ringside by kissing him on the lips. The matchup between Kenny Omega and CIMA started off deceptively slow, but then all at once accelerated, getting very intense, very quickly. CIMA answered Omega’s precision strikes with a Schwein (“White Noise” to WWE fans) onto the apron that occasioned the chant of “You killed Kenny!” throughout the building. This was not WWE “wrestling”, and these were not WWE fans. The strong-style stallions went on to exchange very stiff blows in NJPW fashion, before Omega summoned the One-Winged Angel to score the pinfall.

The main event was a tag team contest between two fraternally predicated teams: the Young Bucks and the Rhodes brothers, Dustin and Cody. The match didn’t reach the fever pitch of the evening’s previous tag contests, as could be expected given the inclusion of the fifty-year-old Dustin Rhodes. Nonetheless, the former Goldust hung in there with the former Stardust, even pulling off a Canadian Destroyer/Styles Clash combo. The Rhodes boys also victimized the Bucks with simultaneous turnbuckle groin kicks, formerly known as the “Shattered Dreams” in the days when WWE was still compelling (that is to say, the days of the WWF). Nonetheless, the Young Bucks fought back by taking a page from wrestling video games and employing the ever-demoralizing stolen move tactic, hitting a Crossroads on Cody. In due course, they perpetrated the unfailingly gaudy Meltzer Driver to secure the pinfall. Afterward, the Bucks attempted to apologize to Cody and Dustin for the gamesmanship tactics they had employed in the lead-up to the match, but they were unfortunately cut off when several key members of the AEW roster processed themselves out to the ring. This interruption did not happen for purposes of storyline, but rather for time considerations. In cringe-worthy fashion, numerous AEW mainstays took the mic and made reference to having gone over time, with some even questioning whether or not they were “still on the air.” They were, and thankfully, before signing off, the cameras were able to capture the presentation of a $150,000 check to the Victim Assistance Advisory Council. This group aids people who have suffered on account of gun violence in America; these individuals were the “Fallen” referenced in the title of the super-card.

Aside from the inventive maneuvers, this social conscience was perhaps the most refreshing aspect of AEW’s Fight for the Fallen. WWE has, of course, traditionally kept its cause-themed super-cards military-centric, as is best exemplified by their annual Tribute to the Troops shows. Military personnel make incalculable sacrifices and undertake unfathomable risks, and so supporting them is a laudable endeavor. But Vince McMahon and his underlings have rarely if ever made a business decision that wasn’t calculated, and so anything bearing the WWE logo is inherently exploitative. Thus, Tribute to the Troops has always smacked of easy positive publicity or, in wrestling terms, a cheap, patriotic pop. Moreover, such an event aligns itself fairly squarely with the American military-industrial complex, situating capitalist interest in close proximity to martial might. As such, Tribute to the Troops clearly courts the more conservative elements of WWE’s fan base. Fight for the Fallen was altogether different. Rather than proffering the predictable plaudits for the people of the American Armed Forces, AEW has been brave enough to identity an egregiously overlooked (and ever-burgeoning) group—the victims of gun violence. Here AEW has displayed the corporate cojones to call out a distressing problem in the United States, one that much of mainline America (and certainly the WWE) have determinedly chosen to disregard: the fact that it’s a risk just to go out in public. AEW is willing to label gun violence as the blight on America that it is, rather than tacitly accepting it as an ignorable downside to sacrosanct Second Amendment freedoms. In acknowledging that America is far from perfect, AEW has demonstrated a moral maturity that the WWE simply does not have. Believe it or not, professional wrestling can (and does) have a socially responsible side, and by cultivating this at Fight for the Fallen, AEW defined itself in marked contrast to the amoral late-capitalist jingoism of WWE.