The first time Nadia Georges (Kyle Kankonde) meets Juliet Gold (Savoy Bailey), they’re both trying out for a ballet role. Nadia tries to be kind to her but Juliet gets in her face and says, “Break a leg. Literally.” And that’s pretty much what happens when Nadia’s mother Salina (April Hernandez Castillo) distracts her and she slips and breaks a metatarsal bone in her foot.

Their next meeting is a bit friendlier. Nadia is struggling to teach dance and suffering through the pain of a bone that wasn’t set properly. Juliet has left dance behind, tired of having to listen to her mother live through her. She’s forced to live on her own with no monetary help, but she has an idea, thanks to her friend Paris (Raquel Antonia). She still dances. It’s a different kind of dance. But still…it’s dance.

Mickey Valle (Rob Figueroa) is their boss at Pandora’s Palace and at first, they seem to be protected. But then he tells her that Paris has left with a man she met in the champagne room. So what seems like a fun way to keep on dancing while earning enough money to pay to live and keep their families taken care of soon spirals out of control — it’s a Tubi movie about exotic dancing, what did you expect? — and soon they’re set up and dancing in the home of organized crime figure “Handsome” Johnny Palermo (Anthony Robert Grasso) and killing made men when they feel like they’re in danger, which puts them in danger that they may not escape. And now, Mickey wants to kill them too.

Directed by Elaine del Valle and written by Cate Holahan (Deadly Estate), Midnight Hustle remembers to empower its leads without descending into the expected exotic dancing downfall for both. Instead, they both gain from the experience, despite the danger they find themselves in.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Tubi is the mom and pop video store of streaming — even if it’s owned by Fox, a fact I don’t like to dwell on all that much — and the movies that it promotes as its originals really prove that. A starring vehicle for former WWE Diva Natalie Eva Marie Nelson — she was already in the movies Inconceivable, Action #1 and Hard Kill, as well as appearing on Celebrity Big Brother — this is the kind of action vehicle that often was created for star athletes in the 80s and 90s like Brian Bosworth (Stone Cold), Howie Long (Firestorm) and, yes, Hulk Hogan (Suburban Commando, No Holds Barred).

Nelson plays Fiona “Phoenix” Grant, an army hand-to-hand combat instructor who leaves the military behind after the death of her mercenary father, Everett (Randy Couture, the former U.S. Army sergeant who became a six-time UFC Champion and the first to hold titles in two different weight divisions). The cops say that he killed himself, but thanks to intel from her former commanding officer General Shackleton (Neal McDonough), she learns that his suicide was set up by a Russian crime family led by Maxim Vasiliiv (Oleg Prudius, who would be better known to WWE fans as Vladimir Kozlov). Maxim and Everett had been battling for years and their final face-off was to be hand-to-hand until a henchman shot the hero in the back of the head.

Now, Phoenix is working her way through the Vasiliiv’s family’s goons, one-by-one. She even goes to lunch with Maxim in a restaurant surrounded by his thugs. There’s also a flashback to when Phoenix lost her mother due to the lifestyle her father lived and a shopping trip with her Aunt Grace (Jessie Camacho, a former police officer and Survivor contestant who played Chupi Chupi on Reno 911!).

Phoenix is packed with tough guys, including Joseph Aviel (who once was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s stunt double), Jonathan Camp, Arnold Chon (a stuntman and MMA fighter), Frank Mir (former two-time UFC Heavyweight Champion, he also has the record for the most finishes and submission victories in UFC Heavyweight history), Rashad Evans (heavyweight winner of The Ultimate Fighter 2, former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion and a 2019 inductee of the UFC Hall of Fame), Phillip Tan (stuntman and trainer for stars like Christopher Lambert) and former Scores bouncer and former New York Hell’s Angels president Chuck Zito, who was also a bodyguard for Lorna Luft, Liza Minelli, Muhammad Ali, Charles Bronson, Michael Jackson, Sean Penn, Chita Rivera, Eric Roberts, Mickey Rourke, Charlie Sheen, Sylvester Stallone and Elizabeth Taylor. He also famously knocked out Jean-Claude Van Damme, standing over him and yelling, “This ain’t the movies! This is the street, and I own the street!” He’s been acting since the 80s, showing up all the way back in 1990: The Bronx Warriors as one of the real bikers that Enzo G. Castellari hired for his post-apocalyptic masterwork.

And hey — Bai Ling is in this as a character named Scavenger, complete with neon makeup that makes her lips look enormous. Man, I love Bai Ling. Keep being in weird parts and showing up unexpectantly!

Director and writer Daniel Zirilli is best known for his action films like Renegades and Invincible, as well as directing videos for Montell Jordan and Scarface, as well as the clip for the song “Short Dick Man” by 20 Fingers featuring Gillette.

Eva Marie has some weird line deliveries in this, but I assume that a lot of the takes were one and done. In truth, this movie isn’t about her talking — or screaming in a shrill blast of a voice as she decimates a room in anger — as it is about her kicking ass. I can report that she does absolutely fine with that.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Ari Novak (Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs, PawParazzi, Assassin’s Vow), who co-wrote the script with Rib Hillis (Extreme Makeover: Home Edition; he also appears in this movie as Jackson Hardison), Kill Shot starts with a suitcase full of cash being stolen by Dina Diablo (Mara Ohara) and Maximus (Bobby Maximus) before the plane carrying it crashes in the Canadian wilderness. Oh yeah — Novak is also in this movie as Alpha ONE.

Kate (Rachel Cook) is just trying to scatter her dad’s ashes and shoot an elk with her hunting guide Jackson, a former Navy SEAL. They find the briefcase — and the $100 million inside — and become the target of Diablo, Maximus and their henchmen.

This was filmed as Hunted back in 2020. Shot in Montana, it has plenty of great locations. What’s really wild about it is for a movie shot today how much it objectifies its lead actress. Beyond scenes where she appears runway-ready despite being deluged in a river, she starts the credits topless with a gun and later runs through the woods in a torn-up flannel and black panties, which doesn’t really seem like the tactical gear one needs to battle a crew of deadly mercenaries. I was stunned a few times, thinking that this had to be a parody and no, not at all, they really filmed this.

Other than that, Kill Shot offers guns ablaze in Big Sky country. I always worry that the action movie industry has gone away — and by that, I mean the direct-to-video one of my teenage years. As long as movies like Kill Shot keep getting made, I know that the guns and fist stories of my youth live on.

You can get KIll Shot from Well Go USA.

After being compromised during a mission gone wrong, an international assassin named Walker (Daniel Stisen) is sent to Reassignment Center 42. There, he’ll get a new identity and be able to erase any trace of his last job and even his past.

However, a ruthless team of operatives led by Keates (Samantha Schnitzler) storms the secure compound forcing Walker to team up with an elite hitwoman named Elda (Lauren Okadigbo) and her mysterious charge Juliet (Yennis Cheung).

Who will survive The Siege?

Directed by Brad Watson and written by Nicole Bartlett, this is a movie mostly cast with stunt performers, which means that it’s all action from literally the first few minutes. You’re not coming to a movie like this for emotional resonance. You want to see people fire guns, do ill-advised stunts and beat the stuffing out of one another. I’m happy to report that this movie delivers more of that than you’ll find in probably ten other movies.

If video stores still existed on the scale of the past, this is the kind of movie that people would rent and be really surprised how much they liked it. They’d say, “I watched this movie with this super muscular dude getting in all these fights, two women had a brutal brawl and man, some dude used pliers to take the teeth from all the people he killed. It was pretty awesome.”

It is pretty awesome.

You can watch The Siege on Tubi.

Based on the wuxia book Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils by Jin Yong, Sakra has action icon Donnie Yen returning to the director’s chair along with Kam Ka-wai and Cheng Wai-man for the first time in nearly two decades while also playing the lead role. Yen is Qiao Feng, the respected leader of a roving band of martial artists called the Beggars’ Sect. After he is framed for the murder of deputy chief Ma Dayuan, his parents and Xuanku, one of the sect’s elders, he is exiled, Qiao Feng decides to seek out where he came from and who the enemies are that have been trying to destroy him.

He escapes along with a servant named Azhu who is nearly killed. Qiao Feng takes her to be healed by doctor Xue Muhua and offers his life to save hers. He jumps into battle against his old sect and is nearly killed before someone destroys all of his attackers.

This leads to Qiao Feng learning who he is, his connection to Azhu, the quest to find the Leading Big Brother and so many more adventures. I liked how Qiao Feng is a man of honor, one willing to drink tea with his enemies before they battle and a man always seeking answers.

You can get this from Well Go USA.

Mickey (George Bashra, who also directed and wrote this film) and his wife Sophie (Maya Stange) have taken their kids Janelle (Ria Maric) and Jake (Finnian James) on a nice quiet holiday break. The kind that has no phone service or internet, the kind that kids hate. Of course, Mickey is an old soldier and when the family finds some mysterious packages, he must save his wife and kids from an army of trained killers.

This Australian action film has made its way to America on Tubi and if you can get past some of the thicker accents, you’ll find an enjoyable film. I mean, how often do you try and fix a big screen TV and find the kind of contraband that someone sends an entire army of mercenaries to retrieve?

“What are you going to do?” asks Sophie.

“What I’m trained to do,” answers Mickey.

These are the kind of guys who threaten a man’s entire family, as you expect for 80s action movie villains, and you know that Mickey’s one weakness is his love for them. You know they’ll be in danger but you also trust that he has a rage inside him that he was keeping inside for years.

Of course, these guys fought Mickey in Afghanistan and killed his brother Noah. Now they want revenge, people who once used to be his friends and now have become men who fight war to make money. Mickey trained most of them and now he has to kill them all.

The film also has a flashback to Afghanistan and shows what happened: Mickey wouldn’t allow them to kill civilians. I’m shocked there aren’t scenes of these guys pie facing children and kicking grandmothers to make them even more sinister.

That said, the fights are pretty great and I liked how each of the henchmen — and woman — have their own personality, kind of like Dreadnoks from G.I. Joe. I mean, they’re Australian, too. Despite all these odds, you never really count Mickey and his family out. That said, isn’t that what these movies are all about?

You can watch this on Tubi.