10 Near-Perfect Sci-Fi Movies That No One Remembers Today

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Published Mar 17, 2026, 4:48 PM EDT

Jeremy has more than 2300 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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The usual suspects of the sci-fi genre, specifically those that are hard to fault, don’t really need an introduction. But they're worth mentioning in this introduction just so there can be some contrast with what follows. The Matrix, Blade Runner, Metropolis, and anything that takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… you're not going to find them here.

Instead, what follows is an attempt to highlight some of the best sci-fi movies ever made that are genuinely obscure, usually with only a few-thousand views (or sometimes even just a few-hundred views) when it comes to those on sites like IMDb and Letterboxd who've seen them. If you want something weird or obscure, but of genuinely high quality as well (or at least films that are enthralling and unique, even with their noticeable flaws), then you should check some of these out.

10 'Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds' (1987)

Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds 3

Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds is the best post-apocalyptic movie set in Australia that’s not about some who’s named Max (and is also Mad). It’s about a small number of characters living in the outback after the world has pretty much ended, with two of them being siblings, and the other prominent character being a mysterious man who wants to help them build some kind of aircraft to get out of the desert.

The whole thing does slowly run out of steam at a point, but at least Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds always remains engaging and oddly intriguing thanks to how striking the visuals are throughout. It’s got a feel and overall vibe that proves just as unique (and strange) as the movie’s title.

9 'Prophecies of Nostradamus' (1974)

When it comes to talking about the greatest disaster movies of all time, Prophecies of Nostradamus doesn’t usually get a shoutout, but maybe it deserves to. It goes big, as a disaster movie, and crosses into a fair few other genres, too, seemingly in pursuit of being multiple sorts of disaster movies all in one, a bit like the sub-genre’s equivalent of a greatest hits album.

The plot here is, as you might've guessed from the title, concerned with the prophecies of Nostradamus, mainly regarding all the ones he purportedly had about the end of the world actually turning out to be right. It’s a movie about things exploding, imploding, and otherwise just getting destroyed by any number of disasters, and it’s way too overlooked, considering how gonzo it is (that does have to do with Prophecies of Nostradamus being an initially controversial and censored release, though).

8 'Chronopolis' (1982)

There’s very little plot to speak of in Chronopolis, and not just because of the 52-minute runtime leading to less time to be spent on telling a story, or something like that. No, Chronopolis is intentionally pretty free of narrative, taking place in a bizarre and alien city that’s home to various immortal beings who are all, to put it mildly, quite bored with the whole never being able to die thing.

It’s an undoubtedly odd animated science fiction film, and one that succeeds incredibly well at feeling genuinely alien in its style and overall feel. Chronopolis probably isn't for everyone, so it being kind of obscure isn't the most outrageous thing in the world or anything… but if you want something odd and unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, as far as science fiction is concerned, then it’s worth devoting 52 minutes of your time to.

7 'The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb' (1993)

Calling The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb a sci-fi movie and leaving it at that would be misleading, since this is also an animated movie, a genuinely unsettling piece of horror, and also something of a dark fantasy/adventure film, too. And it does all that with a runtime that only exceeds the one-hour mark by a single minute, so it’s pretty ambitious overall.

It’s about a boy who’s the size of a doll, and he gets kidnapped and held in a lab before breaking out and going on a perilous journey throughout a surprisingly horrifying world to try and get home. The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb is done with stop-motion animation, and really eerie stop-motion animation at that, making it easy to recommend to anyone who enjoyed – or was unnerved by – the more recent (yet still somewhat underrated) Mad God.

6 'God Raiga vs. King Ohga' (2020)

God Raiga vs. King Ohga is the sort of movie you watch, then maybe don’t think about it for a while, and then question whether what you saw was actually real when you do remember it again sometime later. It’s part of a trilogy that goes more off the rails with every movie, as 2008’s Reigo: King of the Sea Monsters feels like a cheap giant monster movie, and then 2009’s Deep Sea Monster Raiga feels like a somewhat sly parody of giant monster movies.

And then with God Raiga vs. King Ohga, it strays into full-on parody territory, or maybe even somewhere beyond parody, because the cheapness here has to be seen to be believed, and has to have been intentional, or some kind of cinematic middle finger to anyone after a genuine giant monster movie. It deteriorates into something properly mind-melting, and you could’ve watched every other kaiju movie under the sun, but if you haven’t seen God Raiga vs. King Ohga, then you're not even close to having “seen it all,” as far as the genre’s concerned.

5 'The Call of Cthulhu' (2005)

You don’t get too many silent movies made after the silent era, which is something of a shame, yet it also makes the likes of The Call of Cthulhu stand out. This film really dedicates itself to the style of horror movies made 100 (or more) years ago, and is about a young man trying to investigate a cult surrounding Cthulhu, which is what his grandfather was working on/obsessed with at the time of his death.

The Call of Cthulhu can count itself among the best (and most underrated) Lovecraftian movies of all time, largely thanks to its aesthetics.

Cthulhu is, of course, a creation of H.P. Lovecraft, and The Call of Cthulhu can count itself among the best (and most underrated) Lovecraftian movies of all time, largely thanks to its aesthetics, which naturally stand out. It just squeaks in at a feature-length runtime, too, though it is under an hour all up, so not by much. Still, some of the best films of the silent era were remarkably short without literally being short films (see Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., for example).

4 'Thunder of Gigantic Serpent' (1988)

Unlike God Raiga vs. King Ohga, Thunder of Gigantic Serpent doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be quite as much a parody of giant monster movies, if it’s even doing that at all, but it’s similarly strange and over-the-top. It’s also got one of the best titles of all time, and it really does live up to said title, delivering something with a gigantic serpent as its central monster. There is thunder, in a sense, because that gigantic serpent wants to rescue the young girl who used to have the gigantic serpent as a pet snake.

She gave that pet snake a formula, by mistake, that causes animals to become giant and stuff. This is all over-explaining things. Thunder of Gigantic Serpent is wonderful and ridiculous, not to mention absolutely chaotic on a tonal front, seemingly unaware of what audience it wants to target. It’s also a re-edit/remix of a movie called King of Snake, and that one is somehow even more obscure.

3 'Summer Time Machine Blues' (2005)

Summer Time Machine Blues is a very endearing and entertaining comedy about time travel, all done with lower stakes – and a lower budget – than most sci-fi movies that deal with time travel in one way or another. It’s about a group of young people who discover a time machine while dealing with a sweltering and fairly uneventful summer, and then various chaotic things happen because of this discovery, unsurprisingly.

Most things with time travel have already been done, or explored, but if something can recycle the expected beats in a way that feels genuinely fun, that can be okay (see also the more recent – and hilariously titled – Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie). Summer Time Machine Blues really deserves more attention than it gets, or has ever got, since it seems pretty obscure and underrated outside of Japan.

2 'Woman in the Moon' (1929)

Three men next to a rocket on the moon in Woman in the Moon

Doing a better job at predicting something that wouldn’t happen until 40 years later than you might expect, Woman in the Moon is a mostly great science fiction epic about, well, traveling to the moon. You can pick it apart if you want, but it’s neat to see something this old look forward in time so effectively, or at least so interestingly.

Maybe it’s a little less surprising when you consider this film’s director, Fritz Lang, also directed Metropolis, and there’s so much in that movie that also remains relevant, but still. No one was doing epic science fiction movies like Lang, and even now, nearly a century later, few filmmakers operating within the sci-fi genre have come quite as close to matching the ambition and oddly timeless sort of quality found in the best of Lang’s efforts.

1 'The Super Inframan' (1975)

While there are technically martial arts movies that are closer to perfect than The Super Inframan, it’s hard to think of many that are genuinely more entertaining, non-stop, and chaotic. This leans into the sci-fi genre far more than most martial arts movies, too, being about a man who’s given superpowers so he can fight for – and defend – the whole planet after monsters try to take it over.

Essentially, it’s got the feel of old-school and wonderfully cheesy monster movies, sort of like some films from the Showa era of Godzilla, but then The Super Inframan is also very much a Shaw Brothers martial arts movie, and it ends up feeling like the best (or hammiest) of both worlds. If you can find someone who’s not entertained by any aspect of this wonderful and ridiculous movie, then check their pulse, because they actually might be dead.