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 ...
I watched it a couple of years ago, and they restored some edits (original release was considered too long for audiences) from a pre-WWII copy that got stranded in South America.
I believe it was 16mm that got patched back in. The master was lost/destroyed during the war.
My other faves:
The Blob (the original -- scared the beejezus out of my 10-y.o. self)
The Thing (John Carpenter's version from 1981)
Silent Running
Quatermass and the Pit
District Nine
Colossus - The Forbin Project
Starship Troopers (so bad it was good)
Robocop (both version were good in their own ways)
Gantz (Japanese; very unique)
Slaughterhouse Five
sounds like it, thanx!
my fave gerry anderson was stingray. it had a boat in it;-)
There was also a Japanese anime of the same title, and loosely based on the same concepts as in the original film, and worth a watch in its own right.
That one scared the dog squeeze out of me.
Interesting list. I never knew Rocketship X-M had been made into a movie.
A few that would make my list:
Gattaca - not really obscure, but a commercial flop when it came out. IMHO, it’s one of the best “near future” sci-fi flicks ever made.
eXistenZ - Great little VR film by David Cronenberg. Very creepy, very stylish. I liked it much more than the big budget Matrix films.
Dark City - Another great little film about (sort of) virtual reality. One of the few times I was genuinely surprised by a movie “twist”.
Enemy Mine - Mid-80s film directed by Wolfgang Peterson, with Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr. in the lead roles. The F/X are kind of dated, and the dialogue is cheesy in places, but it’s still a very interesting sci-fi film about enemies forced to cooperate in order to survive.
i have a bunch on ice for later ehen i no longer have to go to work....AND the most underrated sci-fi - babylon 5
I agree it was pro-life, and probably couldn't be made today. One of the themes is that people chose surrogates that were more more beautiful, or different than themselves. People projected an image of themselves completely different from who they really were. People interacted with the idealized projected image of each other, not the real person. And the real people stayed home, afraid to interact with anyone, hating themselves for not being the ideal they wanted to project. The chief "villan" thought that was evil.
A forgotten movie seems to be Fantastic Voyage. It was hyped for Rachel Welch, but it was a really interesting concept. I would love to see that remade, but at an even smaller scale of minification where the journey is inside of cells.
The above got away from me. Can it be deleted?
Thanks, I remember that while the movie didn’t work it was better than failed movies usually are, perhaps because of Bruce Willis, and I remember that I was interested in thinking of a way to recommend it to freepers as being a sleeper positive message movie.
The first time I saw The Twonky, it scared me.
I’ve seen the Japanese anime variation on YouTube.
Colossius....The Forbin Project was a ahead of its time.
There are a number of things about Gog that are both ahead of its time and humorous (though I’m sure they didn’t mean it that way). Perhaps the best is at the end, when the Lab Director talks down to the US Secretary of Defense like he was a 10 year old kid.
I actually own a copy on DVD. You can find a lot of those obscure, old movies at a site called “Monsters in Motion”.
http://www.monstersinmotion.com/
Also, while I’m thinking about it, “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes” was good too.
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