Posted on 08/09/2014 12:34:57 PM PDT by EveningStar
In these days of seemingly weekly science fiction blockbusters (which are usually SF in name only… they're actually just big gun actioners that take place in the future) and the hype that surrounds them, it's easy to forget that once such films were the low man on the totem pole. Stuff fit for kids and juveniles but not serious adult audiences. Thus, in past decades, except for a few A list films like Them and The Day the Earth Stood Still in the 1950s and Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and Logan's Run in the '60s and '70s, many SF movies slipped under the radar or were simply shrugged off by the critics...
With the foregoing in mind, we come to our list of the 10 most underrated classic science fiction films which will be rated not strictly from least underrated to most underrated, but from good to best of the bunch. All of them, in any case, are films that never really took the screen world by storm, nor the SF community for that matter, but that offer elements that deserve the attention of any SF film fan. All are solid little films each with surprising angles that will reward the patient viewer willing to look past production values and embrace the singular worlds they bring to life...
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
How about “The Islamo-Nazi President”? Very scary movie.
My late grandmother was mentioning to me a few years back about seeing “Just Imagine” at the theater when she was a teen back in 1930, and how fascinating she found it. I actually had the film on tape, which I recorded when it was shown on a local station in the early-1990s. So, I showed her the film, but this time, nearly 70 years later, she found it pretty bad. I always thought it was an interesting curiosity, but I would have prefered someone besides El Brendel in the lead. He’s a comedian I never particularly cared for.
But it was fun to see the young and fetching Maureen O’Sullivan. I actually once opened a car-door for her, in her later years, after she attended an event.
Zardos!!
Winner!!
I never heard “that” referred to as “The Twonky”. I would kinda lose track too.
8) Phase IV - didn't see it
I saw this one in the theatre with my dad. I was 15 and barely remembered it until now.
Out of all of the selections, this one has the most potential for a serious SF film.
“Hardware” from 1990 starring Dylan McDermott. Pretty obscure and definitely underrated - this guy picks up a cyborg head for scrap and it’s a weapons grade killer machine that starts rebuilding itself in his girlfriend’s apartment and wreaking havoc.
I too had high hopes for the Will Smith adaption, but they did a terrible job with it. They wasted all those special effects on a poorly done screenplay.
2001 was a 1960s get high and go get your mind blown, movie.
Actually a good movie if you read the book and knew the story. Clark’s book was very good and the movie followed it pretty well, but without explaining it to the audience and that was Kubrick’s fault. Both writer and director put the story together as a team. The movie perhaps needed narration or subtitles with brief explanation between the scenes. Also the psychedelic scenes would have been better if cropped a bit.
I know people who saw the movie multiple times and had no idea what the story was about.
Many come to mind.
4-D Man (1959), starring the great Robert Lansing. This actually used a concept from physics, that molecules in solid objects are relatively distant from each other. But if you vibrated one solid object at just the right speed, another solid object could pass through it. Lansing does this, but then achieves the ability to do it without help, but at a dreadful cost.
Idaho Transfer (1973), directed by Peter Fonda. “It is a cross between an idiotic mess and a brilliant masterpiece.”
A Boy and His Dog (1975), starring a young Don Johnson. Based on a post-apocalyptic novel by Harlan Ellison. Not what anyone would expect.
so many more...
Your mother mates out of season. one of the funniest lines i ever heard in a movie i liked District 9 too 
“They Live”
Masterpiece— caught it for the first time two weeks ago
(everybody I know is on the hook for not turning me on to it earlier!!)
Every time I visit my parents, dad calls me to the living room and he has The Thing queued up... He starts it before I get there, I hear the music and I yell from the kitchen “Close the door!” as that’s like the second line in the film and the guy says it about 10 times in that first 10 minutes.
that one gives me nightmares...
“The Thing”
Enough good things can not be said about this film.
All these years I thought I was the only one............thanks!
— This Island Earth
— Gog
— Gattaca
The rural Virginia community in which I lived from 1961-1963 had but one TV station, and that station played an after-school movie. I think it used the "Dialing for Dollars" format.
They would show one movie per week, and would repeat it every day.
When Gog was shown, I watched it every day. I was really absorbed by it. Of course, I was only seven or eight years old.
It contained all kinds of scientific and technical subjects I was interested in, all tied together in a very weak plot.
Radar, remote control, atomic energy, spaceflight, centrifuges, death-rays, robotics.
The LASER had not been invented when Gog was made, so that magical acronym never appears in the movie, even though deadly heat rays zap objects and persons in several scenes.
In the end, the bad guys turn out to be the Communists, who had taken control of a secret government lab from a satellite in Earth orbit. An F-86 is dispatched to blow the satellite out of the sky, which is taken care of very quickly once the square-jawed scientist investigator is dispatched from Washington to look into what's wrong at the lab.
The lab in question was - I strongly believe - modeled after the Santa Susanna Field Station in the mountains east of Simi Valley, CA, which really was a secret lab back in 1954, when Gog was made.
Near SSFI (on the same mountain, I believe) is the Spahn Ranch, at which numerous Westerns and cowboy-themed TV shows were shot. It (the Spahn Ranch) is also where Charles Manson kept his "family."
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