About a group of helicopter pilots hired to protect a space mining colony (yes, really), it nominally stars Malcolm McDowell as the villain, but he’s only really in about five scenes. Moon 44 (1990)īefore he became famous as Hollywood’s new Master of Disaster (taking over from Irwin Allen), Independence Day and 2012director Roland Emmerich made this mid-to-low budget sci-fi oddity. Is it worth seeing? Oh yes – and so too is Stanley’s second film, Dust Devil. Its story, about a military robot putting itself back together and menacing a post-apocalyptic ghetto, is a familiar one, but Stanley gives it real verve – Hardwarehas a stylish, artistic edge that most low-budget genre films of the period sorely lacked. Go back to his debut, Hardware, and you can why see he was such a promising filmmaker. But as the 2014 documentary Lost Soulreveals, his career was unfairly cut short by the infamously nightmarish production of The Island Of Doctor Moreau. It’s sad to think that, at the dawn of the 1990s, Richard Stanley was being hailed as one of Britain’s finest young directors.

Is it worth seeing? There are worse ways to spend an evening, put it that way. Look out for Jim Belushi in a small role as a school principal. Jesse “The Body” Ventura stars as intergalactic cop Abraxas, who ends up fighting his rogue ex-partner Secundus (an equally beefy Sven-Ole Thorsen), who’s gone rogue, fathered a child (by touching a woman’s belly and immediately making her pregnant) and hopes to use the offspring as a means of gaining unlimited powers. This, surely, is the best title of any 90s sci-fi film. So here’s a mix of everything from hidden classics to forgettable dreck, with a few films falling somewhere in between… Abraxas: Guardian Of The Universe (1990)

We’ve picked 50 live-action films that fit these criteria, and dug them up to see whether they’re still worth watching in the 21st century. Think back to the science fiction cinema of the 1990s, and some of the decade’s biggest box-office hits will immediately spring to mind: The Phantom Menace, Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Men In Black, Armageddon, and Terminator 2were all in the top 20 most lucrative films of the era.īut what about the sci-fi films of the 1990s that failed to make even close to the same cultural and financial impact of those big hitters? These are the films this list is devoted to – the flops, the straight-to-video releases, the low-budget and critically-derided.

Dead space movie horror 1991