15 Forgotten Sci-Fi Movies You'll Wish You'd Seen Sooner

[00:00:00]This is Slaughterhouse Five.

[00:00:03]Five is English five.

[00:00:05]>> Actually, my date said >> Every year, thousands of people discover a movie that changes how they see science fiction forever. And their first reaction is never joy. It's a total frustration because the film they just watched came out decades ago and somehow nobody ever told them about it. That's what this list is. 15 films that time buried and history got wrong. And these are not obscure for a reason. In fact, one of them won an Oscar for best actor and then vanished so completely that most people alive today have never heard its name. Another predicted deep fakes, digital actors, and stolen faces back in 1981 and Hollywood laughed at it. And then there's number one, a movie made by the most famous director in science fiction history, a name you absolutely know, a film almost nobody has actually watched. It got taken away from him, cut against his will, and the anger from that single betrayal reshaped Hollywood forever. By the end of this video, you'll have a watch list you'll wish someone had handed you years ago. Number 15, Slaughterhouse Five, 1972.

[00:01:19]>> It's all right, Billy.

[00:01:21]Many years ago, a certain man promised to have me killed.

[00:01:24]>> In 1969, George Roy Hill directed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a film that grossed over a hundred million dollars worldwide and turned him into one of the most bankable directors in Hollywood. In 1973, he directed The Sting, which won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. Between those two massive hits, Hill made a time travel science fiction film based on one of the most celebrated American novels of the 20th century. Slaughterhouse Five was produced on a budget of 3.2 million dollars. During production, the film required recreating the firebombing of Dresden during World War II, constructing an alien zoo on a distant planet, and weaving together a fractured timeline that moved without warning between decades of one man's life. Hill shot the film in Prague at Barrandov Studios with additional work in Minneapolis. He cast an unknown stage actor named Michael Sacks in the lead role of Billy Pilgrim, a decision that drew no stars and no safety net. Sacks earned a Golden Globe nomination for most promising newcomer. Valerie Perrine made her film debut, and then Slaughterhouse Five opened, and the box office was dismal. The film ranked 34th among domestic releases that year and disappeared from theaters quickly.

[00:02:40]Vonnegut himself publicly praised the adaptation, writing that Hill and Universal Pictures had made what he called a flawless translation of his novel. Number 14, Fantastic Planet, 1973.

[00:02:58]René Laloux landed a job at a progressive French psychiatric institution called La Borde, where he organized puppet shows for the patients and eventually began collaborating with them on short animated films. One of those early projects, Monkey's Teeth, won a prize in 1960 as the best French animated film of the year. It was there that Laloux began developing the visual language he would eventually use to create one of the strangest science fiction films ever made. Fantastic Planet started production in 1968 at the Jiří Trnka Studio in Prague, a French-Czech co-production based on a 1957 novel by Stefan Wul. Behind the scenes, Laloux partnered with Roland Topor. Together, they built a world where giant blue aliens called Draags keep tiny humans as pets, breeding them, playing with them, and periodically exterminating them when their numbers grow inconvenient. The humans are called Oms, a word identical in sound to the French word for men. On paper, this is a potential hit, but then the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. In August 1968, tanks rolled into Prague and production shut down entirely. The Czech authorities had already been uneasy about the project. The surrealist content bore no resemblance to socialist realism and the political allegory was barely disguised, but the film was bringing in hard currency from France and that financial lifeline was the only reason it survived. Production resumed in 1969 with new French financing and a team of 25 animators spent the next four years creating over a thousand pencil drawings in pastel shades, each one sliced into sections and moved frame by frame under a camera using cutout animation techniques. The finished film ran just 72 minutes. Unfortunately, when Fantastic Planet opened in the United States, it earned roughly $194,000 at the box office. In France, it sold just over 809,000 tickets. It was a total disaster. Number 13, Looker, 1981.

[00:05:00]>> Well, I mean, I I couldn't What time?

[00:05:05]>> In 1981, Michael Crichton made a film about a corporation that scans human bodies into a computer, creates digital copies of real people and uses those artificial versions to replace the originals in advertising. That was not a dystopian exaggeration. That was the plot summary for a movie released 40 years before the SAG-AFTRA strike put the exact same fears on the front page of every entertainment publication in the country. The Ladd Company produced Looker on a budget of $12 million and here's the thing. Crichton had been thinking about the concept since 1975 when he visited a Los Angeles computer company to research how digital copies could be used in commercials. He discovered a company in Texas already doing it through a process called tomography. What he intended as a satirical comedy kept getting less funny the more he researched. By the time filming began, the script had evolved into a thriller starring Albert Finney as a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, James Coburn as a corporate villain, and Susan Day as a model whose body is scanned into a three-dimensional digital replica. That scanning sequence produced the first CGI human character ever rendered with 3D shading in a commercial film, months before Disney's Tron reached theaters. Crichton, who had already pioneered 2D computer animation in his 1973 film Westworld, was quietly building the technical vocabulary of a revolution nobody was paying attention to. When Looker opened, the film grossed just 3.3 million domestically. James Coburn later said publicly that his part had been gutted in the editing room, and that the studio had cut the film for a television print. He called it a $12 million production that they simply threw away. Number 12, Screamers, 1995.

[00:06:45]In 1981, Dan O'Bannon adapted Philip K.

[00:06:48]Dick's 1953 short story Second Variety into a script that sat in development hell for over a decade, passed between producers, optioned and abandoned repeatedly until it finally went into production in Canada with a rewritten version. On paper, the source material alone should have guaranteed attention.

[00:07:07]Dick's story is about self-replicating machines designed to kill enemy soldiers that begin evolving on their own.

[00:07:12]O'Bannon had written his adaptation around the same time he wrote his script for We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. On a budget of roughly $65 million, Total Recall became a massive hit. On the other hand, Screamers, built from the same writer adapting the same author, got a fraction of the investment and none of the marketing push. The film was directed by Christian Duguay and shot on location in Quebec. Screamers opened and grossed approximately 5.7 million domestically against its $14 million budget. Number 11, Slipstream, 1989. Slipstream was produced by Gary Kurtz, the man who had helped George Lucas build Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back before their partnership fractured. By the mid-1980s, Kurtz was in financial trouble. His investments in The Dark Crystal and Return to Oz had underperformed badly enough to force him into bankruptcy in 1985. Slipstream was supposed to be his comeback. So, he hired Steven Lisberger, and together they assembled a cast that should have been impossible for a mid-budget genre film. Mark Hamill was offered the role of the antagonist, a ruthless bounty hunter, because Kurtz had always wanted to see him play against type. Bill Paxton signed on as the lead. Robbie Coltrane, Ben Kingsley, and F. Murray Abraham all took cameo roles. Filming began in March 1988 at Pinewood Studios with a reported budget of $15 million and a planned 10 weeks of shooting. But, the production was troubled right from the very start. The original script had been circulating Hollywood for years and went through multiple rewrites.

[00:08:44]Lisberger brought in writer Tony Kayden to reshape the story from what Kayden felt was a low-budget Star Wars imitation into something more philosophical. Substantial material was cut before filming even began, and a voice-over introduction had to be added later to explain the story gaps left behind. Slipstream opened in the United Kingdom and debuted at number three, but quickly collapsed against competition from The Naked Gun and Die Hard. In Australia, it grossed just $66,836 during its entire theatrical run. The worldwide theatrical gross fell short of $2 million against that $15 million budget. Number 10, Time Crimes, 2007.

[00:09:25]Before he made this film, Nacho Vigalondo's 7-minute film, 7:35 in the Morning, earned a Best Live Action Short nomination at the 2004 Oscars. And it was that recognition that gave him enough credibility to scrape together financing for his debut feature. The budget he got was $2.6 million.

[00:09:43]No stars, no special effects, no Hollywood studio, just a Spanish countryside, a small cast, and a script so precisely engineered that it plays like a mechanical watch where every gear drives the next. And here's the thing, Vigalondo wrote, directed, and played one of the roles himself because the budget did not allow for another actor.

[00:10:04]Behind the scenes, he deliberately made his time machine look janky and outdated rather than sleek, refusing to let spectacle distract from the mechanics of the plot itself. In fact, Vigalondo himself appears on screen as the mysterious scientist guiding Hector deeper into the trap, blurring the line between creator and character in a way that mirrors the film's obsession with causality. When Time Crimes opened, it earned a stunning 90% approval rating among critics, and its reputation grew so strong that Hollywood began circling remake rights. Number nine, Charlie, 1968. Cliff Robertson watched Hollywood steal his roles twice. He had starred in the original television productions of Days of Wine and Roses and the Hustler, and both times the studios handed the film versions to bigger names. Jack Lemmon got the first, Paul Newman got the second. So, when Robertson starred in a 1961 television adaptation of Daniel Keyes' story, Flowers for Algernon, he did something no one expected. He bought the rights himself.

[00:11:04]No studio was going to take this one from him. And here's the thing, Robertson paid William Goldman $30,000 out of his own pocket to write the screenplay. Goldman, who had not yet written a single produced film, delivered a draft that Robertson showed to Keyes with the writer's name removed from the cover page. Keyes hated it. The character's name had been misspelled throughout, and the script ended with an implausible happy ending that gutted the emotional core of the story. The story follows Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of 69 who undergoes experimental brain surgery that transforms him into a genius, only for the effects to begin reversing. Robertson plays both sides of that transformation, the childlike innocence and the bitter brilliance, in a performance that requires the audience to believe they are watching two entirely different people inhabit the same body. When Charlie premiered in September, it was a hit. The film earned $7.25 million in North American theatrical rentals and another $1.25 million overseas, making it the 16th highest-grossing film of 1968. Number eight, Attack the Block, 2011. Four years before John Boyega picked up a lightsaber in Star Wars and two years before Jodie Whittaker was announced as the 13th Doctor, both of them were unknown actors in a low-budget British alien invasion film that most of the world never saw. That film was Attack the Block and it did more to launch two future franchise icons than any casting director in Hollywood. The budget was approximately $8 million.

[00:12:36]Before production, Joe Cornish wrote and directed the film as his feature debut.

[00:12:40]He spent months researching real life in South London housing estates, interviewing teenagers and incorporating their actual language into the script.

[00:12:49]On set, one girl, asked what she would do if she found a strange alien creature, said she would not touch it because she did not want to get chlamydia. That line went straight into the film unchanged. But here's the thing. Cornish was not interested in Hollywood's version of urban life. He wanted the real thing and his cast delivered it. Boyega, 15 years old during filming, played Moses, a teenage gang leader who evolves from petty mugger to reluctant hero over the course of a single night. The production was backed by Film4 and StudioCanal with Edgar Wright serving as executive producer. The creature design began with two men in gorilla-like suits with animatronic jaws and Swedish effects house Fido spent four months adding over a hundred digital effects shots giving the aliens their signature look of pitch black fur that absorbs all light and bioluminescent jaws that glow in the dark. When Attack the Block opened it earned roughly 6.2 million dollars worldwide. The film won audience awards at South by Southwest, the Los Angeles Film Festival and Fantasia.

[00:13:51]Unfortunately, none of that translated into box office success. Number seven, The Thirteenth Floor, 1999. The Thirteenth Floor was written and directed by Josef Rusnak and produced through Roland Emmerich's Centropolis Entertainment. It was based on Daniel F.

[00:14:06]Galouye's 1964 novel Simulacron Three.

[00:14:10]The budget was sixteen million dollars.

[00:14:12]The cast included Craig Bierko, Gretchen Mol, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Vincent D'Onofrio and Dennis Haysbert. Not a single marquee name capable of competing with Keanu Reeves. The concept was genuinely compelling. A computer scientist in 1999 Los Angeles discovers that his company has built a perfect virtual simulation of 1937 Los Angeles populated by digital beings who do not know they are programs. The film handled this idea through noir atmosphere and philosophical tension rather than kung fu and bullet time. But here's the thing, the film did not have the visual spectacle to compete and critics punished it for that timing. When The Thirteenth Floor opened the total worldwide gross landed at just 18.5 million dollars. Number six, Until the End of the World, 1991. Wim Wenders had dreamed of Until the End of the World since 1977. He finally secured funding following the critical success of Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire assembling a genuinely massive production budget of roughly 24 million dollars. At the time it was the most expensive German film ever produced. Behind the scenes Wenders set off on a production that lasted 22 weeks across 11 countries on four continents. The film was set at the turn of the millennium, and Wenders wanted the technology and the music to feel like they came from a world just slightly beyond the present. So, he did something extraordinary. He wrote to every musician he admired and asked them to contribute an original song written in the style they imagined they would be making a decade into the future. U2, Talking Heads, Nick Cave, R.E.M., Depeche Mode, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, Neneh Cherry, and Daniel Lanois all responded. Nearly every song on the soundtrack was created specifically for the film and debuted in it. Then came the disaster. Wenders' initial cut ran 20 hours. His backers had contractually required a standard feature-length film. He agonized through edits, eventually delivering a 158-minute American cut and a 179-minute European version, both of which he later called the Reader's Digest versions of the project. In fact, he and his editor Peter Prażagada secretly copied the complete film negatives at their own expense and spent the next year assembling a five-hour director's cut that they screened privately at festivals over the following decade. The truncated theatrical release was a catastrophe. Warner Brothers opened it in the United States in December 1991 on just four screens. It grossed under $830,000 total. Number five, Capricorn One, 1977.

[00:16:47]Peter Hyams was a journalist covering the Apollo missions when a thought struck him that he could not shake. The most important event in human history, a man walking on the moon, was verified by exactly one camera and almost no direct witnesses. As he later put it, his parents' generation believed that if it was in the newspaper, it was true, and that turned out to be, in his words, nonsense. He wrote the screenplay in 1972, a thriller about a faked Mars landing, and not a single studio in Hollywood wanted to make it. The idea of a government agency staging an elaborate public deception was considered too implausible. Then Watergate happened and suddenly everybody believed it. The budget was approximately $5 million.

[00:17:27]The film's climactic aerial sequence, a chase between two helicopters and a biplane, was described by Hyams as one of the most dangerous sequences ever filmed. Preview audiences in multiple cities stood up and cheered during the same moment of the chase. But here's the thing, one of the film's aerial coordinators and stunt pilots, Frank Tallman, died in a plane crash before the film was released. Warner Brothers estimated spending another $5 million on advertising alone. The gamble paid off.

[00:17:55]Capricorn One grossed over $43 million worldwide against its $5 million budget, making it the most successful independently financed film distributed by a major studio in 1978. Number four, World on a Wire, 1973. Rainer Werner Fassbinder made World on a Wire for West German television in 1973 and for nearly four decades afterward, almost nobody outside of Germany could see it. And here's the thing, Fassbinder adapted the film from Daniel F. Galouye's 1964 American novel, Simulacron 3. Made for West German television on a strict budget of roughly 900,000 Deutsch marks, the production ran 212 minutes across two broadcast parts. Filmed in Paris because Fassbinder felt the city's cold modernist architecture looked more futuristic than anything available in Germany. Behind the scenes, Fassbinder shot the entire film on 16 mm in 44 days during a hiatus from another production with his frequent cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, behind the camera. In the same year, Fassbinder completed three other films. That pace was not unusual for him. Between the start of his career and his death in 1982 at the age of 37, he directed over 40 films.

[00:19:07]World on a Wire originally aired as a two-part mini-series on ARD, the German public broadcasting network. After that broadcast, it essentially ceased to exist in the public consciousness.

[00:19:18]Number three, Brainstorm, 1983. Douglas Trumbull directed Brainstorm on a budget estimated between 16 and 18 million dollars for MGM. Trumbull's concept was a film about scientists who invent a device capable of recording and playing back the full sensory experience of another person. And here's the thing, before filming began, Trumbull took his key cast and crew to the Esalen Institute in Northern California to prepare them for the psychological territory the film would explore.

[00:19:47]Principal photography started in September 1981 in North Carolina at locations including the Elion Hitchings Building in Research Triangle Park and Duke University before moving to MGM Studios in Culver City for interiors.

[00:20:02]Then, on November 29th, 1981, during a production break, Natalie Wood drowned off the coast of Catalina Island. She was 43 years old. Wood had completed nearly all of her scenes, only two remained, but MGM, already financially strained and nervous about the production, used her death as an opportunity to shut everything down and file an insurance claim. The studio locked every set. Nobody could enter or leave without special permission.

[00:20:29]Trumbull fought to finish the film.

[00:20:31]Brainstorm was finally released on September 30th, 1983, almost two years after Wood's death. It grossed just over 10 million dollars domestically.

[00:20:40]Trumbull swore he would never direct another Hollywood feature again, and he never did. Number two, Seconds, 1966.

[00:20:48]Seconds was directed by John Frankenheimer, who had just completed The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May, two political thrillers that tapped into Cold War paranoia with surgical precision. The screenplay, adapted by Lewis John Carlino from David Ely's 1963 novel, tells the story of a middle-aged banker who is so deeply dissatisfied with his life that he pays a secret organization $30,000 to fake his death, reconstruct his face through plastic surgery, and give him a completely new identity. Principal photography began on June 14th, 1965 on a budget of $2.5 million.

[00:21:26]On set, cinematographer James Wong Howe shot the film using seven handheld cameras during certain sequences, including a wine-crushing bacchanal that Frankenheimer staged during an actual annual event near Santa Barbara. In one scene, Frankenheimer got Hudson genuinely drunk. Hudson started crying and could not stop. The footage stayed in the film. Seconds premiered in New York on October 5th, 1966 and was a box office failure. The flopped commercially and faded into obscurity for decades. Number one, THX 1138, 1971.

[00:22:02]Before Star Wars, before Industrial Light and Magic, before the most profitable franchise in cinema history, George Lucas made a film that nobody wanted to see. It was cold. It was bleak. It was brilliant. And the wound it left on him changed the course of filmmaking forever. THX 1138 began as a 15-minute student film Lucas created while attending the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 1967 titled Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB. It won first prize at the National Student Film Festival and caught the attention of Francis Ford Coppola, who was so impressed that he convinced Warner Brothers to fund a full-length version through his new production company, American Zoetrope. The studio agreed and provided financing as part of a seven-picture deal. The budget was exactly $777,777.

[00:22:54]Behind the scenes, Lucas shot the film using documentary-style cinematographers who had no experience with Hollywood lighting techniques, which was precisely the point. He wanted the film to look clinical, stripped of warmth, visually hostile. The underground chase near the ending was filmed in a still unfinished segment of the San Francisco Bay Area's BART subway system. Post-production lasted a year with Lucas editing by day in his Mill Valley home and Murch assembling the film's radical sound design by night. When Coppola presented the finished film to Warner Brothers, studio executives hated it. They demanded the negative and handed it in-house editor who cut approximately five minutes against Lucas's wishes. The studio then barely supported its release. THX 1138 opened on March 11th, 1971 and earned just $945,000 in rentals. It was a commercial disaster. Warner Brothers was so furious that they revoked their entire deal with American Zoetrope and demanded Coppola repay the money already invested in future projects.

[00:23:57]If you made it this far, drop a comment telling us which film on this list you are watching first. And if you think someone you know needs to see this video, send it to them. We will see you in the next one.