well, none of mine made the 1,000-vote qualification, so I’ll fall back on my other lesser-known favorites.
Daikaijû Tôkyô ni Arawaru, aka The Great Monster Came to Tokyo. A 1998 film starring Kaori Momoi, from Memoires of a Geisha. As far as I know, I’m the only one who’s ever voted on it (I gave it 8). It’s a “monsters destroy Tokyo” movie, except that the entire thing is seen from a tiny village in the mountains of Fukui prefecture. Neither we, nor the townspeople, ever actually see the monsters, it’s instead the story of how everyone reacts to the sporadic TV and radio reports. The film never quite decides what it wants to be, bouncing between drama and comedy with an ending that always gets my eyes watering.
Complex World (51 votes). A night at a live house in Providence, Rhode Island. Some great music, some hilariously bad music, phone calls with the dead, and a terrorist plot.
The Atomic Cafe. Only 945 votes, but you guys should all know this one. Duck and Cover!
I am a huge Hugo Weaving fan. Tivo picked this up. At first I was just fast forwarding to see him, and the scene was so good, I had to back it up and watch it from the beginning. I need to buy the DVD as I think we let it fall off the Tivo.
Also, Kiss Me, Guido Italian New Yorker wants to be an actor and answers an ad for to be a roomate looking for a GWM, thinking he is a Guy With Money.
Whenever the topic of movies comes up, I sometimes toss in this one and strangely enough, though it seems to have gotten a fairly respectable number of votes on IMDB, no one ever seems to have heard of it:
This is one of my all-time favorites. It’s before the Branagh/Thompson split, and they were magnificent! Not that they aren’t still magnificent, but they were so incredible together. I love Wayne Knight’s performance in this movie - he’s just adorable. Robin Williams has a cameo but he is extraordinary - a superb, cutting performance.
“I would never hurt you, Margaret.”
One of the scream-provoking lines in the movie. Sounds like a perfectly ordinary line - but watch the movie. It’s stunning. (Yes, I have it on DVD. )
Billy’s Holiday (1995) - Australian film about a small time night club singer/single father who finds he can sing like Billy Holiday - great music (80 votes, BTW)
Strictly Ballroom(1992) - another Australian film that doesn’t fit the SDMB definition of obscure (7302 votes), but no one I know has even heard of it, let alone seen it. Plot: Male condender on the Ballroom circuit picks an unknown to enter into the world championship with, instead of the partner his parents prefer.
Hey, you have my dog’s name - love that name!
Um, ‘Strictly ballroom’ is well known and loved in Australia and NZ.
Try ‘The Castle’ - same genre and Australian too.
I loved ‘Betrayed’ and ‘Shy People’ - both from US but underrated and under known!
All time favourite and barely known is movied version of ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’.
Great low budget movie that’s way better than it has any right to be.
A devout Catholic cop investigates a series of murders where the perpetrators all claim that they did it because (surprise!) God told them to. Where it leads him…
I just thought of another one: Chan Is Missing, directed by Wayne Wang. It’s about two guys in San Francisco’s Chinatown searching for a friend who disappeared with $4000 they loaned him to get a taxi license. What makes the movie interesting is all the different characters the protagonists encounter in their search for Chan.
Wang spent only $22,000 in 1982 to make Chan Is Missing. I thought it was his first movie, but according to IMDB he made A Man, a Woman and a Killer in 1975. Chan Is Missing has only 179 votes on IMDB, while A Man, a Woman and a Killer has fewer than 5 votes.
Strangers in Good Company–low budget, Canadian, probably unscripted, slow-moving, beautiful scenery, aged cast of women. Certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, but I liked it.
Bad, BAD, bad cheese, but OH so much fun. Don’t watch if you don’t like the concept of oddness-as-normality. The special edition DVD came out not that long ago and is packed with nifty stuff, and of course the whole movie is tongue-in-cheek anyway. But nobody I talk to has ever heard of it. Real Genius
A young Val Kilmer, a hyperkinetic girl who is a genius and still looks hot in a wetsuit, and a geeky kid SAVE THE WORLD! Well, ok, not really, but it’s a helluva lot of fun, nobody seems to have heard of it (it took FOREVER to come out on DVD!), and it’s got excited bromide in an argon matrix! What’s not to love?
Yeah, great movie. Hot nerd girl. (Think a human “Gadget”)
Though of course, jaded as I am, I can’t help but think that…
…the spaceborne laser assassination weapon they kept the government from developing could have been used to take out dozens, perhaps hundreds, of terrorists with high accuracy and little collateral damage. Oops. :smack:
Kinda like in The Last Samurai, when Tom Cruise’s character…
…Arguably set the stage for decades of Japanese nationalistic militarism, without any possible restraining influence of the western powers. Double whoops. :smack:
Probably because they’re not that obscure. One of the earlier posters suggested that if it has got over 1000 votes on IMDB that it’s probably a bit too well known to fit in this thread.
I’ve got two more that I remembered. The Well is an Australian film. It’s a psychological drama that creates a real sense of isolation. A young woman takes a job as a housekeeper for an older woman and her father who live on a farm far out in the country. There is an undercurrent of complicated emotions underlying their relationship. It’s left ambiguous as to whether Hester is sexually attracted to Katherine or whether she sees Katherine as a way of living out her long-abandoned dreams of independence and a life for herself.
The other is one of the weirder movies I’ve seen: Heart. There’s a fairly tangled plot and a few unlikely coincidences, but overall it’s pretty good. There is one fairly shocking scene that gives you a lot of insight into one of the character’s obsessive behavior. I’d rate it a bit higher than the 6.6 it gets on IMDB because it tries something more ambitious than most films.
These won’t be obscure here but to the majority of people I mention them to, I get blank stares and ::::cue the crickets:::
Gregory’s Girl (watched it about 20 times when I was a kid)
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (the two people I know who saw it hated it)
Slaughterhouse Five (it’s true the only people I know who saw it were my ex and my parents)
Angel Baby
THX 1138
Dead Alive (I laughed until I peed)
Frisco Kid
Sister My Sister
When Night is Falling
Twilight of the Golds
Damage
Liquid Sky
A Boy and His Dog
The Linguini Incident
Never Cry Wolf
Schizopolis
The Razor’s Edge
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring
The Four Seasons
Table For Five
The Last Time I Committed Suicide
The Secret Lives Of Altar Boys
Love and Human Remains
Metropolis
Osama
The Wife
and a couple of shorts I’ll mention before I head off to bed
A Bullet in the Brain
**The Twenty (?) Mile Limit ** (A short from the early 80’s that I have searched endlessly for both here and on Google and apparently I am the only person on Earth to have seen it so maybe it was an hallucination.
Oh, there’s another movie I thought was fantastic but the title escapes me. I’m sure someone else out there has seen it.
It was foreign, Scandanavian, Iceland, Greenland, ( I don’t recall) It may have been silent (but it was filmed in the 90’s I believe) about two brothers and their Mom living in a cabin in the mountains. A sort of twisted oedipal desire develops in one of the brothers. Tragedy ensues.
The set was low budget but beautiful. Jeebus, sorry for such a lame description but does anyone have any idea of the title?
Great movies both, but obscure? Buckaroo has a definite cult following and Real Genius has had 7,022 votes with a 6.7 rating. Pretty good for a B movie from 1985. {It is one of my favorites. I gave it a 10.}
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