Life is like a road trip. Sometimes you’re flying down the highway with the tunes blasting, making good time and other times you’re stuck in gridlock traffic listening to agriculture news on public radio. Everybody needs to take a break and stretch their legs.

When the traffic of your life is so congested that you can’t see what’s up ahead, pull off at the next exit and find a rest stop convenience store and stock up. In this case, let your favorite streaming channel serve up the cinematic equivalent of Mountain Dew and Skittles so you can refuel and focus on the next leg of your journey.

Not every movie experience needs to be a thought provoking exploration of the human condition. Sometimes you want unplug and just escape with 90 minutes of Nicolas Cage fighting haunted animatronic critters or Margot Robbie unleashing mayhem as everyone’s candy-colored agent of chaos.

Brainless movies can be junk food for your soul. The following are a few guilty pleasures that made my synapses do a little happy dance. Hope they do the trick for you because watching a bad movie can sometimes feel pretty good.

Have fun, dear readers!

LIFE IS A VIDEO GAME

Ready Player One (Now Streaming: Netflix, Hulu)

Ernest Cline’s best-selling dystopian fantasy novel about virtual reality videogames gets the big screen treatment by non-other than Uncle Steve Spielberg. The book surfed a wave of Gen-X nostalgia to win over readers, dropping a torrent of 80’s video games, movies and comic book mentions in place of an actual narrative. The movie version takes fewer detours, telling a more straight forward tale but includes lots of Easter eggs to keep you engaged. The visuals are slick, completely immersing us in this videogame world, but Steve tries a little too hard to make a “Spielberg” movie.

Willy’s Wonderland (Now Streaming: Tubi, Freevee)

Kind of like Five Nights at Freddy’s but fun! This movie is the Citizen Kane of haunted kiddie arcade flicks! Nic Cage plays a drifter stuck in a small town who is hired to spend the night fixing up Willy’s Wonderland, an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese knockoff. Little does he know, the animatronic characters inside come to life and they have a taste for blood. The filmmakers spent their whole budget on Cage and they get their money’s worth. He goes for broke in this craptastic spectacular. It’s over-the-top B-movie madness!

KILLER LADIES

Birds of Prey (Now Streaming: Max, Netfix)

Before she was Barbie, Margot Robbie lit up the world as Harley Quinn in the Suicide Squad movies. This flick is a confetti cannon of a movie with Robbie getting a solo turn as the alluring antihero. This time out, Harley’s been fantabulously emancipated and recruits a crew of badass ladies to take on the local mob boss. As the bad guy, Ewan McGregor chews so much scenery that I think he now needs dental work. You probably missed this one in the theaters because it premiered about a week before the COVID lockdown so catch it now. It’s crazy, kooky, and colorful. Worth a watch just for the subplot involving Harley’s beloved fried egg sandwich.

Alita: Battle Angel (Now Streaming: Hulu)

Alita is teen girl cyborg in the future, who is found and repaired by kindly old Christoph Waltz. She then competes in some kind of roller derby thunderdome and fights cyborg thugs for the entertainment of the mega rich. Alita has no memory of her past but slowly starts to realize that all is that what it seems, including her mysterious benefactor. This movie looks really cool in that “is it live action or is it computer animated” sort of way, but the story makes little to no sense. Director Robert Rodriguez and producer James Cameron have created a fantastic world. Too bad they populated it with some really dull people.

MONKEY TROUBLE

Rampage (Now Streaming: Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV)

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson plays a badass primatologist (is there any other kind?) who teams up with a geneticist after his beloved gorilla buddy grows really huge and scary after being exposed to some nastiness that fell to Earth from the International Space Station. The big ape joins up with a ginormous wolf and a gigantic crocodile and they converge on Chicago for the final showdown. Why the Windy City? I guess they all like deep-dish pizza. Based on a videogame, this flick is tons of dumb, but it goes down easy.

Kong: Skull Island (Now Streaming: Max)

In the final days of the Vietnam War, Samuel L. Jackson leads a crew of soldiers and scientists to a mysterious island in the Pacific where they encounter the legendary Kong and a host of other crazy critters. It’s “Ape-pocalypse Now” as Sam and his cronies bring the pain to the primal predators on Skull Island. Grenades and machine guns and helicopters, oh my! Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, and John Goodman are along for the popcorn-munching fun. It’s probably so much more entertaining than the CGI-heavy monster fest coming soon to theaters.

RELAX. REFRESH. RECHARGE.

Like my friend Ferris Bueller once said: life moves pretty fast so always remember to take a minute to look around or you might miss it. Make sure to pause every now and then to recharge your psyche.

Whether that’s with a soak in the soothing waters of silly cinema or a long walk with your favorite someone, take the time to unplug and relax. A few hours just for you can feel like a mini vacation. And doesn’t that sound nice?

Enjoy, my friends!