Death Watch. Harvey Keitel as a human camera whose job is to record the life of a dying woman for a reality TV show. The movie (from 1980) predates most reality TV and is a great near-future extrapolations ever, focusing on the small things that change. It was barely released in the US, but is intelligent SF at its best.
It Came From Outer Space. A Jack Arnold production about aliens who are taking over humans. But it turns the alien invasion trope on its head. Also, one of the most effective uses of 3D ever.
The Day the Earth Caught Fire. Chilling end-of-the-world film. Nice for a young Leo McKern and an ambiguous ending.
The Monolith Monsters. A very different type of alien menace.
I do think that most 50s SF movies are badly underrated these days. They certainly don’t have great special effects, but their stories are more compelling, since they usually show people using their brains to defeat the menace instead of an out-and-out fight.
As noted above, The Monolith Monsters presents a very different Menace from Outer Space. Lots of books on SF film point it out.
Another very influential (yet mostly overlooked) one is Kronos, made by the same special effects team that gave us Forbidden Planet. as in FP, the visuals are GORGEOIUS. You wouldn’t think that a giant robot that’s little more than two boxes atop each other, with a cylinder joining them, would look very impressive, but it does. The scenes of its destruction are absolutely wonderful. The film is shot in Cinemascope wide screen, although in black and white. Unfortunately, it’s brain-dead. It’s the story of an alien Giant Robot sent to steal our electrical power, and it’s destroyed by Phlebotinum and Unobtainium.
The film must have been a favorite of Brad Bird’s, because he invokes it in two of his feature-length cartoons. The Iron Giant is not only about a Giant Robot sent to steal our Electricity, but his first appearance, rising slowly from the sea, echoes that of Kronos. The other is The Incredibles, also about a Giant Robot attacking a city. The code name for the project is … Kronos.
Kronos is worth watching just to see the thing propel itself along – it “walks” on three piston-like legs that pound up and down and a fourth that rotates. It’s like a Martian Tripod from War of the Worlds, but with one more leg and a weird method of locomotion.
Another wonderfully wacko film is Gog, about utilitarian robots in a secret underground facility that get reprogrammed by a foreign power (an unnamecd Russia, again) and get turned into killer robots. It was filmed in color and in 3D. I’ve never seen the 3D version, although apparently a print survives. It was made by Ivan Tors, and is set in the same universe as his film the Magnetic Monster, which is black and white, 2D, and a lot less interesting. It’s also the same universe as Riders to the Stars, a justly neglected 1950s SF film with a stupid premise. But it was written by Curt Siodmak, who gave us a lot of Horror Tropes, including most of our Werewolf lore, and who revived the meme of vampires dissolving in sunlight.
Curt Siodmak is also responsible for F.P. 1 Does Not Answer, a film made three times in three languages with three different casts (the German version features Peter Lorre!) about sabotage on an artificial island constructed in the Atlantic to provide a way-station for planes in the 1930s to cross the Atlantic without having to go far into the North. Interesting, but most of it is a pedestrian mystery.
I’ll add one more from the 1950’s: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms Starting from a SF short story (The Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury), the Special Effects were of pretty high quality for the time, the story hung together, and unlike other monster films, this one could be shot or blown up, but with a nice twist on why you couldn’t do it. Also note the sniper at the end who makes the shot to kill the beast…even then he had those deadly eyes.
I watched a 2009 film called Carriers on TV. A familiar story (group of friends trying to survive a world ravaged by a fatal flu like disease) but it did it very well. There was a heart wrenchingly sad set piece involving a little girl needing to use a portable toilet of all things. The girl’s father was played by Chris Meloni of Oz and LAO: SVO fame while Chris Pine was one of the friends.
For monster movies, there’s always Gorgo. Another film whose ending makes it stand out.
Phase IV. Another very different menace, with an ending that defies the usual. Directed by legendary film title designer Saul Bass, so it’s visually fascinating.
Another vote for Dark City.
George Lucas’s THX-1138 has been overshadowed by his later films, but it shouldn’t be.
Demon Seed sound silly in concept* but it’s got some nice horror elements, and once again for my list, a non cliched ending.
The Fabulous World of Jules Verne is a fantastic adaptation of Verne, in the style of his original illustrations. Proto-steampunk visuals.
*A computer wants to impregnate Julie Christie . . . no, on second thought, that’s not silly. Computers have needs too.
This is a interesting question. There are a lot of over-rated SF films, a lot, and highly over-rated, making most good SF films are under-rated in comparison.
Beast is the UR-1950s monster flick. It’s the first one to have all the elements – Beast awakened by/created by atomic bomb/radioactivity. Handsome young scientist tries to convince people of it, but unsuccessfully at first. It wreaks an anonymous chain of havoc until it reaches the City. Then the Young Scientist and his female protege (and love interest) advise the Army trying to kill it off, and finally hit on a way to do it. They have One Shot, but it succeeds.
Not only was it the first 1950s monster flickj to do this, it also provided an excuse and showcase for Harryhausen to use his Dynamation/Dynarama/“reality sandwich” technique for incorporating his animated monster into scenes. He used it as a substitute for all those miniature sets, glass paintings, miniature rear-projection, and other tricks that had been used by his mentor Willis O’Brien, but which he didn’t have the team or budget to do. It was a technical revolution – Harryhausen used it in just about every movie he made after this.
Other 1950s monster flicks weren’t up to the high standard he set, for the most part. Most of them didn’t use animated models. a lot used Men in Monster Suits. (The guy who directed Beast later made two similar Monster Films, but set in London instead. The Giant Behemoth had an animated monster – animated by Willis O’Brien himself, in fact. And the aforementioned Gorgo used a Man in a Suit, which makes it Not One of my Favorite Films)
It also answered some basic questions about the Monster Film, and provided better answerrs than anyone since ever gave it:
1.) Why did the Monster Invade the City? Monsters shouldn’t invade cities. Animals, even if they’re huge, tend to avoid people and habitations. The only reason King Kong ended up in New York is that we brought him there. The plot of Beast explained that it was, like a salmon or an eel, instinctively returning to where it used to breed. we just happened to build New York City there in the meantime.
2.) why couldn’t the army just shoot a Really Big Shell at him? Monsters aren’t invulnerable. The real answer, of course, is that it’d make for a short film. Kong was agile, and ended up atop the tallest building, making it hard to reach him, until they brought out airplanes to get close and shoot him. The Rhedosaur in Beast couldn’t do that. The explanation in the film was that it was diseased, and its blood carried the pathogen. If they blew it up, the blood would go all over the city.
When they remade Godzilla back in 1998, they didn’t really remake the Japanese Gojira – they stole the pl;ot from Beast from 20,000 Fathoms – the creation/awakening by atomic bomb, the chain of destruction as it heads for New York City, even the reason for its going there – it was going to New York to spawn.
I liked Screamers, which I thought was a pretty solid adaptation of the P.K. Dick story “Second Variety”. Never seems to get much recognition among sci-fi films though.
Another film that was relatively ignored was the virtual reality film The 13th Floor, eclipsed by another VR film released at the same time, the Matrix.
13th floor has the distinction of being based on the first VR novel, Simulacron 3 by Daniel F. Galouye (which had already been adapted for television). It’s definitely a must-see film.
David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ is another relatively neglected VR film from the same year. Also worth the watch.
Americans didn’t get to see this film the way the Japanese saw it until about 15 years ago. Finally, a subtitled version of exactly what was released in Japan was released on DVD here in the US, and it’s brilliant.
Godzilla has cheesy over-dubbing, and the gratuitous addition of Raymond Burr to add a Western character for Americans to relate to, but he’s wholly unnecessary, and just means that to make space for him, other stuff gets cut.
Gojira was made for an audience who had actually lived through the bombs falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so an American watching it in the 21st century almost feels like a voyeur, and you have to keep reminding yourself that it’s a movie, meant for people to see. Not enough Americans have seen Gojira, because they don’t know the difference between it, and Godzilla.
Even more relevant was the Fukuryu Maru, the “Lucky Dragon” fishing boat that got caught in the fallout from the first H-bomb blast. They didn’t know what it was, and the whole crew got sick with radiation poisoning. One of them died of pneumonia brought on by his weakened condition. By that time the catch had been brought back to port and sold. No one knew where it had gone, and in Japan, where seafood is a much bigger part of the diet than in the US, this affected everyone. They went through checking fish with a geiger counter, and burying known or suspected contaminated fish. To get a parallel, imagine that a huge load of ground beef destined for American fast food places like MacDonald’s and Burger King got irradiated. Nobody’s eat at those places, and they wouldn’t trust the ground beef at the supermarket, either. And, of course, everyone would know about it. Gojira opens with the crew of a fishing ship seeing a bright light on the horizon, just like the Fukuryu Maru did (the scene is in *Godzilla, too, but the scenes in the film have been re-ordered, so it’s not at the very beginning). It’d be impossible for the movie-goers to miss the similarities and implications.
I just rewatched Colossus a couple of days ago. You’re right, very underrated film. Eric Braeden (He had to Americanize his name to get cast in the film) was quite good, and the feeling as humanity begins rapidly losing control is very unsettling. The ending, although a little abrupt (possibly because they were setting up a sequel that never got made) is disturbing but feels right - no one is able to defeat the computer by giving it a logical riddle it can’t solve so it blows up, like Captain Kirk did.
D.F. Jones, who wrote the novel Colossus, upon which the film is based, did write two sequels – The Fall of Colossus and Colossus and the Crab. They’re worth reading. I don’t know if they ever planned making a sequel film, but i kinda doubt it.
All very good. Demon Seed would make a good double bill with Colossus: The Forbin Project.
Phase IV is also very unsettling. If you haven’t seen the original ending that was cut out of the film, watch it on YouTube - an amazing Saul Bass montage of what humanity will become in the world of the ants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beLpsWaUDNk
Both very good. I think the 1970s were a heyday for thoughtful, often dystopian fiction, that more or less mirrored the New Wave movement in SF. Those kind of movies became much less common after Star Wars came out.