I wouldn’t have considered it an obscure movie, but no one I know knows of it, and it hasn’t been mentioned here yet, so…
My Favorite Year
1950’s New York. Golden Age of Television setting. Peter O’Toole as Alan Swann, a thinly disguised Errol Flynn character, with Mark-Linn Baker as the network flunky who acts as Swann’s “wrangler” in the days leading up to his guest appearance on a TV show. Hilarious and touching. Everyone should see this movie.
That’s my favorite “obscure” movie.
Not too obscure and one of my Favorites. I gave this a 10 on the IMDB. It has received only 2,153 votes. So I guess it nearly qualifies. I’ll second your mentioning it.
Jim
I’ll third it. (See, it’s rising from obscurity as we speak!)
The Ninth Configuration
A must see.
“I think it’s one of a kind. A film that sums up what it means to be a CULT FILM. Here is a film that really is not geared to any audience. It doesn’t try to wow anyone with any explosions or special effects, it simply has a philosophy and a message, and it gives us this message in a very unique plot.”
One of my favorite obscure movies is Bridge to the Sun, starring James Shigeta. It only has 104 votes on IMDB. Don’t know how to link to the page, but you need to see this movie. It is based on a true story about a woman who married a Japanese diplomat before WWII, and they are deported to Japan. Very sad.
The easiest way to add a link is too just copy it from the address bar of your browser and paste it in the edit window.
SDMB will resolve it into a link.
Another way is to use the little Hyperlink tool in the edit window. It is the Globe with the paperclip. When you click it it will prompt for the words you wish to show and then prompt you for the link.
Bridge to the Sun (1961)
Jim
Most everything I could have mentioned has already been taken, but there are a couple that haven’t appeared yet:The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T (1953). The first (and best) live-action Dr Seuss movie. Tommy Rettig, later of “Lassie” fame, is trapped in the castle of the evil Dr Terwilliker and his giant piano. As if that weren’t bad enough, he has to wear a “Happy Fingers” beanie. But he’s saved by an atomic Air-Wick.
The First Nudie Musical (1976). For some reason, Amazon Women on the Moon brought this one to mind. Unfortunately, Cindy Williams doesn’t get nekkid, but lots of other people do—and how can you resist a movie which contains a number called "Dancing Dildoes?"And that, in turn, leads me to . . .Can I Do It 'Till I Need Glasses? (1977). My ex-wife made me go out in the rain to get this when she was pregnant with our first daughter. Most husbands only have to run out for ice cream . . .
This is a terrific movie and proves that Stacey Keach can act.
Flesh & Blood may be too well known to be counted here, with over 2000 votes, but it’s obscure enough that the only people I’ve ever known who have seen it, besides me and a buddy who worked at a video store for two years, are some Dopers. It’s a surprisingly realistic and relatively historically-accurate movie set in the early Renaissance. Paul Verhoeven directed, and it stars Rutger Hauer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tom Burlinson (a less than well-known actor who was in the Snowy River movies). Of course, being a Verhoeven film, there is graphic sex and violence, including rape, but considering the subject matter it is appropriate. The biological warfare, using plague corpses, is actually not an anachronism. There are written accounts of such tactics going back to the Greeks.
Iceman is also pretty unknown. It’s about a Neanderthal corpse that is found frozen in the arctic and revived by a scientific outpost. John Lone is completely unrecognizable as “Charlie.” He and Timothy Hutton create a completely believable relationship between a paleolithic man of a different branch of humanity and a modern scientist trying to understand and learn from this distant cousin. This movie actually made me cry.
The most obscure of these three is a movie I saw one afternoon on TV. It stuck with me for years afterward. At 161 votes, I think it’s safe to say that practically no one else has seen it. A Grande Arte, retitled Exposure for US release, is about a photographer who travels to Brazil for a project. He starts as a pacifist, appalled by the violence he sees there, and ends up becoming a knife fighter himself in order to take vengeance on the killer of one of his models. It’s a dark, gritty film with none of the Hollywood flash you would expect given the subject matter. Peter Coyote’s character changes believably over the course of the movie and does not take those changes lightly. The relatively few fights (given the atmosphere of violence deliberately cultured by the director) are realistic and very nasty.
I also tried to find a film that I thought was titled simply “The Music Box,” but which doesn’t seem to be listed on IMDB. It’s a quirky little film with no dialog that I remember. A mousy little man in late middle age finds a music box in a pawn shop one day when he stops in on impulse one day on his way home from work. He opens the music box and is surprised when angels (played by three black men dressed in white suits) appear and cheerful music starts starts to play. The music is so compelling that his entire demeanor changes and he begins to dance.
He buys it and opens it sometimes when he is unbearably depressed by his life. He initially keeps it a secret but his wife eventually finds out about it and is also uplifted. There is no real ending to the film. The contrast between the drab urban environment and the angel scenes is one of the elements that made this movie stand out to me. The communication between the man, his wife, and the angels is entirely through body language.
If anyone has seen this movie, I’d love it if you’d give me some information on how to find it. The last time I saw it was when I was about 15.
Big fan of that movie; basically I dig Rutger Hauer flicks.
Never seen it, nor even heard of it.
But I did manage to google this info about it. I couldn’t find an imdb listing for it either, which strikes me as odd for a film whose cast includes Jessica Lange, Armin Mueller-Stahl and Lukas Haas.
And it’s not a matter of being listed under a different title, as the link I found shows that it was released in 1989, and Jessica Lange’s imdb page lists no projects for her that year.
Wonder what’s up with that…
Aha! With only 996 votes I give you How To Get Ahead In Advertising a movie which made me pee myself giggling. Richard Grant does a high speed comeapart better than almost anyone.
Meet The Hollowheads only got 91, which doesn’t actually surprise me much, but the movie has its moments. It’s the softening jelly, I think…
Tapeheads has 963 votes–I had it on VHS and now I have the DVD too! Roscoe is da MAN!
How about Whore? Rather uneasy flick, but I’m a sucker for Theresa Russell as well as Ken Russell so I had to see it… Only 737 votes for this one…
I like the movies nobody sees–blockbusters are for compost… 
Cadence - Martin Sheen and Charlie Sheen play father and son, directed by father, also starring Lawrence Fishburn… “Gig for Bean”
Casualties of War - perhaps lost among Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, this i a great Vietnam war film starring Sean Penn and Michael Jay Fox…
You’re confusing two different movies called Music Box (or maybe The Music Box). The one that Sleel describes is a 1980 film directed by James F. Robinson. There’s no IMDb entry for it, but it’s described on several webpages, including this one:
http://www.christianfilms.com/musicboxvhs.htm
This is not the same as the 1989 film starring Jessica Lange.
Reasonable, sure, but I’m still going with The Great Waldo Pepper at 1,175; you’ve got Robert Redford guiding off a William Goldman script right after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and right before All The President’s Men, directed by George Roy Hill as in The Sting and – well, in Butch Cassidy, at that; you’ve got young Susan Sarandon and young Margot Kidder as the love interests, you’ve got WWI-style biplane stunts (complete with Redford doing his own wing-walking, even). This movie shouldn’t be “Not Available On Netflix” obscure, but it is.
A great apocalyptic movie that sometimes gets overlooked-- The Last Chase. Medium obscure. A surprisingly good job from Lee Majors (the Bionic Man). It may be Lee Major’s best film (betcha didn’t know there was such a creature). It also costars Chris Makepeace from My Bodyguard and Meatballs.
I recently heard about an obscure movie called Equinox that I wouldn’t mind seeing.
Bedrooms & Hallways Hugo Weaving plays a supporting but hilarious role as a Real Estate agent England. We still get giggles about thinking about Margaret Thatcher, Vinyl, and the Inuit room.
Men with Brooms How can you not love a curling movie?
Some of Atom Egoyan’s movies got a bunch of votes but I have to mention “The Adjuster” as it’s one of my father’s favorites. I like it in particular for the role by Egoyan’s wife as a movie decency rater who sneaks in a camera to tape all the movies she previews. And Elias Koteas. You can’t go wrong with Elias Koteas.
I’m afraid I’m already acquainted with it. “Oh God…Oh man…Oh God…Oh man…Oh God…Oh man…Oh God… Oh man…Oh GOD!”
The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra a movie done in the style and spirit of those cheesy '50s B-Movies so often savaaged on MST3K, the character of Animala (a woman made from 4 different forest animals) steals every scene she’s in… Rowr!
Sundown; the Vampire in Retreat a Horror/Comedy/Vampire/Western (yes, you read that correctly…) taking place in the town of Purgatory, NM, stars David Carridaine as Count Mardulak, and Bruce Campbell, playing against typecasting as the nebbish Van Helsing…
My favorite movie is one that everybody has heard of, but few have actually seen; The Right Stuff. Overlooked, to be sure, but not nearly obscure enough for this thread.
I remember Sorceror very well. It was supposed to be the big movie of the summer of '77, but something unexpectedly came up. It was on cable just after we got it, when the pay channels only had about a dozen movies for each month. And then I rented it again recently. I’ve also seen the original Le Salaire de la Peur (The Wages of Fear), from 1953. (4,283 votes on IMDB, and ranked #113) (I know I risk being branded a Philistine, but I like the remake better.)
And then there’s Le Trou, a French prison-break movie. I saw a subtitled version on television when I was traveling in Europe a few years ago; I don’t speak French or read German and it was still riveting. It just arrived from Netflix yesterday, I’ll see if it holds up when I can understand the dialog. (1,538 votes, but I’ve never met anyone who’s heard of it.)