Top 6 Worst Sci-fi Movies on HBO Max

Top 6 worst Sci-fi movies on HBO Max. Photo: Syfy Wire

Already done with the Snyder Cut? If you are looking for something, off the beaten path, here are the six most underrated sci-fi movies on HBO Max

1. Fantastic Planet (1973)

Photo: Criterion

Nothing else has ever looked or felt like director René Laloux’s animated marvel Fantastic Planet, a politically minded and visually inventive work of science fiction. The film is set on a distant planet called Ygam, where enslaved humans (Oms) are the playthings of giant blue native inhabitants (Draags). After Terr, kept as a pet since infancy, escapes from his gigantic child captor, he is swept up by a band of radical fellow Oms who are resisting the Draags’ oppression and violence. With its eerie, coolly surreal cutout animation by Roland Topor; brilliant psychedelic jazz score by Alain Goraguer; and wondrous creatures and landscapes, this Cannes-awarded 1973 counterculture classic is a perennially compelling statement against conformity and violence, said Criterion.

2. The girl with all the gifts (2017)

Photo: Entertainment Weekly

“The Girl With All the Gifts,” directed by Colm McCarthy, is a moderately engrossing, reliably gory British variation on the tried-and-true zombie-apocalypse theme with a first-rate cast. The formula, worked almost to death — or is it undeath? — on “The Walking Dead” and elsewhere, has been tweaked a bit. The shambling, vacant-eyed cannibals are called “hungries,” and their infection seems to be fungal rather than viral. Also, some are cute, normal-seeming children, including the title character, a young girl named Melanie (Sennia Nanua), according to NY Times.

The specifics of Melanie’s situation are laid out in the first act. She lives in a research compound with other, similar children, locked into a prisonlike cell and into a daily routine that is a cruel, dystopian parody of normalcy. The inmates, referred to by the guards as “abortions,” are shackled to wheelchairs and brought into a classroom. Their instruction is more for purposes of research than education, but at least one teacher, Ms. Justineau (Gemma Arterton), goes against protocol and treats her students as if they were human beings. Which is what they seem to be, at least until their hunger is activated.

3. Scanners (1981)

Photo: Criterion

With Scanners, David Cronenberg plunges us into one of his most terrifying and thrilling sci-fi worlds. After a man with extraordinary—and frighteningly destructive—telepathic abilities is nabbed by agents from a mysterious rogue corporation, he discovers he is far from the only possessor of such strange powers, and that some of the other “scanners” have their minds set on the world domination, while others are trying to stop them. A trademark Cronenberg combination of the visceral and the cerebral, this phenomenally gruesome and provocative film about the expanses and limits of the human mind was the Canadian director’s breakout hit in the United States.

4. Code 46 (2003)

Photo: DeviantArt

This is a love story set in an eerily possible near-future where cities are heavily controlled and only accessible through checkpoints. People cannot travel unless they have "papelles," a special travel insurance. Outside these cities, the desert has taken over and shanty towns are jammed with non-citizens - people without papelles whose lives are severely restricted. William (Robbins) is a family man who works as an insurance investigator. When his company sends him to another city to solve a case of fake papelles, he meets a woman named Maria (Morton), Film Jabber cited.

Although he knows she has been creating the forgeries, he cannot help but completely fall in love with her. He hides her crime and they have a wild, passionate affair that can only last as long as his papelles: 24 hours. Back home, William is obsessed with the memory of Maria. He tries to see her but is refused the necessary papers to travel. Desperate, he uses one of the fake papelles he kept from his investigation. He eventually tracks her down, only to discover that she has been accused of a 'Code 46' violation...

5. Rodan (1956)

Photo: Wikipedia

The movie is about a village which is besieged by prehistoric nymphs when a more horrifying discovery is made. A giant flying creature that resembles a pteranodon emerges. Soon a second monster appears, converging with its mate in Fukuoka.

"Pretty straightforward, altogether, and if Rodan has a fatal flaw, that's it: it is an entertaining, well-made monster movie with absolutely nothing on its mind. The human drama is of interest solely because the humans involved are intimately involved in the attempt to stop the Rodans, and there is not the remotest attempt made to flesh out the small mining town where the bulk of the action happens with particularly distinctive characters (I have named three actors so far in this review; that's already one more than the film is terribly keen on having). Insofar as it has a soul whatsoever, it's because Sawara is hugely likable and casual in the central role of Shigeru, making for a terribly pleasant everyman hero in the face of this gigantic menace", Alternate Ending wrote.

6. Dune (1984)

Photo: Pretty Much Geeks

Dune is not the masterpiece its adherents have hoped for — but neither is it the disaster its detractors have claimed. Adapted from Frank Herbert's sci-fi cult classic and directed by the eccentrically gifted David Lynch (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man), this lofty $40 million allegory of interplanetary insurrection, long thought unfilmable, is at once a work of almost visionary beauty and surprisingly conventional adventure. Fans shouldn't mind the excessive length and too-deliberate pacing, and while those elements could well render the picture's infinite intelligence inaccessible to certain other audiences, it is nonetheless a hotter property than the inexplicably cold feet of its distributor, Universal, would seem to indicate, Hollywood Reporter commented.