7 More 1990s Sci-fi Movies You Forgot Were Awesome

The 1990s proved to be one of the best decades for science fiction movies. Total Recall, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Universal Soldier, Jurassic Park, Stargate, Independence Day, Mars Attacks!, Event Horizon, The Fifth Element, Men in Black, Starship Troopers, The Matrix, they all came out within a ten-year time frame. Sure, there was a Mimic or Johnny Mnemonic here and there, but there was plenty of gold there, too. What follows are ten sci-fi movies that don’t get the credit of the Independence Days and Jurassic Parks of the world, but they’re perfectly entertaining and quite often ambitious, nonetheless.

We’re not saying the following sci-fi movies, some of them genre-blenders like sci-fi horror, are entirely unheard of. All we’re saying is that they deserve to have their fanbases expanded.

7) Darkman

Sam Raimi’s pre-Spider-Man, and wholly original, superhero movie, Darkman is a revenge tale with a high concept and razor-sharp execution. We follow Liam Neeson’s Peyton Westlake, a scientist working on a synthetic skin who finds himself in the crosshairs of a group of gangsters after his lawyer girlfriend gets on their bad sides.

Burned and left for dead, Westlake puts his experimentation to good use. Specifically, he adopts the appearance of the villainous Robert G. Durant’s goons, turning the criminal organization in on itself.

Stream Darkman on Peacock.

6) Hardware

Richard Stanley could have been one of the great sci-fi directors, had his big-budget Hollywood debut, The Island of Dr. Moreau, not gone to hell. But it’s easy to see how he got that gig in the first place, as his directorial debut, Hardware, is an impressive one.

This is basically a B-movie cyberpunk version of The Terminator. In a post-apocalyptic wasteland of a world, a scavenger gifts his artist girlfriend with a robot head. Little do they know, the head belonged to a combat unit, which is now using pieces of scrap metal laying here and there to rebuild itself for a killing spree.

5) I Come in Peace

In I Come in Peace, Dolph Lundgren plays a cop who doesn’t play by the rules. His adversary is an alien who only says, “I come in peace” and throws bladed, whirring future discs. In other words, it’s a very silly movie.

Then again, there’s nothing wrong with silly on a Saturday night. Especially when it’s silly that ends with the villain saying “I come in peace” and the hero saying “And you go in pieces, a**hole.”

4) Godzilla vs. Mothra

Godzilla’s Heisei era was arguably even more consistent than his classic Shōwa era. The ’80s movies The Return of Godzilla and Godzilla vs. Biollante are fantastic, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II was fun, and the seven-film run concluded very well with Godzilla vs. Destoroyah.

The center of that run consisted of three films that brought back classic Shōwa era adversaries. Specifically, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, Godzilla vs. Mothra, and the aforementioned Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II. Of those three, Godzilla vs. Mothra was the best. At the very least, it was the most thematically rich of the trio.

Stream Godzilla vs. Mothra on The Criterion Channel.

3) Body Snatchers

Of the four movies based on Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers, two of them are great, one of them is very good, and one of them is awful. Abel Ferrara’s 1993 take, Body Snatchers, is the very good one.

With a dour tone, both visual and thematic, and the ingenious idea to move the plot to a military base, it’s a claustrophobic and jarring little sci-fi horror flick. The protagonists may not be interesting even before they become pod people, but at least it’s a movie that knows how to surprise the audience on occasion.

2) Demolition Man

While he’s mostly played heroes, Wesley Snipes always seemed to be having a ball playing the villain. Take for instance New Jack City, or his even more boisterous performance as Simon Phoenix in Demolition Man.

This is a pretty straightforward mano a mano fist-throwing extravaganza with a sense of humor and some funny ideas of what the future might look like. Specifically, it’s a world where the biggest cities have been combined, expletives are illegal, and sex is of the tantric variety. The movie perpetually falls just short of being smart, but at least it tries, and without a doubt it’s one of Sylvester Stallone’s most all-around effective movies of his very mixed bag ’90s.

Stream Demolition Man on AMC.

1) Screamers

Some fantastic movies have been based on the works of Philip K. Dick. Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, The Adjustment Bureau, they’re all fantastic. Screamers falls below those films, but it’s still an ambitious and entertaining sci-fi horror movie with committed performances by RoboCop‘s Peter Weller and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors‘ Jennifer Rubin.

While it’s based on a short story that came out 30 years before James Cameron’s The Terminator, one can’t help but get some T-800 vibes with this one. It involves a war in the future and AI-powered robots that take on increasingly convincing human disguises with each self-made subsequent iteration. It’s a B-movie, like Hardware, but an enjoyable one, nonetheless.

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