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Comment by Borrible | Hacker News Reader

Phase IV is clearly underrated and widely unknown, yes.

But Westworld, Omega Man, Logans Run, Silent Running, Soylent Green and Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

I think this is more of a listicle for those not familiar with how utterly bizarre 70's scifi movies could be. Underrated by non-genre movie fans specifically. One curiosity not listed was "Capricorn One", one of OJ Simpsons movies. Another is the first Mad Max which squeaks in at 1979.

Another genre that could use similar treatment is the 70's disaster movies like Towering Inferno, Airport and their ilk.

I wouldn't consider the first Mad Max as a scifi film though I love its awful acting and general cheesiness. It's far more of an action film than anything else as it doesn't really examine why society is breaking down from what I can remember.

I categorize "society breaking down" into other genres, not SciFi (unless fictional technology has an important place).

Soylent Green - not SciFi, distopian.

Brave New World, Logan's Run - maybe SciFi, also distopian.

The Time Machine, Bladerunner - definitely SciFi.

Aeon Flux - Science Fantasy (there's no even halfway plausible scientific mechanism for the key element).

Whilst Soylent Green is dystopian, I'd consider it scifi as it features food recycling technology and suicide booths. (Edward G Robinson was terminally ill when he shot Soylent Green and died just a few weeks after filming - makes his death scene quite poignant although his co-stars weren't aware of his bladder cancer).

The food recycling is a good point. I didn't see anything scientific or technologically special about the suicide booths.

Suicide booths are a common theme in scifi dystopias though. If they joke about it in Futurama, then that's good enough for me.

Depending on which version of the film you've seen, some of the cheesiness and awful acting likely comes from the US dubbed version. That said, it still is somewhat mindless action.

See: https://jalopnik.com/the-aussie-mad-max-is-so-much-better-th...

They dubbed an Aussie film?

Luckily, the version I saw in the UK was the non-dubbed version.

Mad Max was a breakdown in global trade and oil that may or may not have been caused by a nuclear war in the north.

I saw this as a young kid, randomly on a TV rerun late at night, not too long after it was released. The fact that it was widely unknown made it seem all the more like a fever dream or something since it was a while before I could even figure out what it was that I had seen. I remember it seeming very surreal and amazingly stylized.

Keep in mind that before video rentals, the internet and streaming, you would see something like this and you might never stumble across it again. For years I'm not sure if I could remember the title, just that it was very stark and about ants.

Now you can put "movie about ants" and Google autocompletes "...taking over the world" and all the top links are about "Phase IV".

Yeah, half that list was movies that I'd consider some of the most highly rated and still talked about sci-fi of the 70's.

As usual with these "underrated" lists, it feels more like "a list of movies you might want to watch if you haven't". Think I'll start replacing "underrated" with that from now on.

Personally I have "Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea"[1] and "Time after time"[2] from the 70s on my watch list. If we stretch the definition a bit, I'll include "The Lathe of Heaven"[3] (1980) and "Icarus XB 1"[4] (1963).

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213322/

[2]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080025/

[3]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081036/

[4]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122111/

For anyone wanting to find Icarus XB 1, it's more commonly known as "Voyage to the End of the Universe"

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