Here are six underrated films worth watching if you’re looking for inspiration, as picked by our Patreon community and podcast hosts GB & AJ.
It spans nine decades of cinema and the list was put together at our monthly Patreon Live Hangout at the weekend – just one of the perks of joining our Patreon.
From a 1932 Universal monster to a rotoscoped sword-and-sorcery cult favourite, here are half a dozen underrated films worth watching.
1. The Mummy (1932) Directed by Karl Freund | Bryn’s Pick
Before the action-packed 1999 Brendan Fraser blockbuster rewired everyone’s expectations, there was this – a slow-burning, deeply atmospheric Universal classic that built its dread on mood rather than monsters.
Boris Karloff plays Imhotep, an ancient Egyptian priest accidentally resurrected when archaeologists read aloud from a forbidden scroll. What makes this film so enduringly effective is what it holds back: the mummified figure barely appears, and yet the film is saturated with menace.
Karloff spent eight hours in Jack Pierce’s make-up, then largely discards the bandages and stalks the film as Ardath Bey, a fez-wearing Egyptian gentleman with hypnotic eyes and an agenda spanning four millennia.
Director Karl Freund – a cinematographer on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – brings a German Expressionist sensibility to the shadows and candlelight. The tragedy at the film’s core, a love story stretching across centuries, gives it an unexpected emotional weight that separates it from its monster-movie peers.
If you’ve only ever seen the remakes, this is the one that started it all.
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2. Fire and Ice (1983) Directed by Ralph Bakshi | Doc’s Pick
Ralph Bakshi and legendary fantasy artist Frank Frazetta came together for this rotoscoped animated epic – and the result is unlike anything Disney was producing at the time.
Evil Queen Juliana and her son Nekron are pushing glaciers across the world, leaving nothing but ash and rubble. Standing against them is Fire Keep, a city perched on a volcano, and a young warrior named Larn who has very little going for him except the will to survive.
The plot is deliberately stripped back – this is pure sword-and-sorcery pulp, in the best possible sense. What it lacks in narrative complexity it more than compensates for with jaw-dropping action and a visual style that remains genuinely distinctive.
Rotoscoping – filming live actors and then tracing over the footage – gives every fight sequence a fluid, almost uncanny weight. There are echoes here that would surface decades later: the Ice Wall, He-Man-adjacent character designs, even hints of Game of Thrones in the elemental conflict.
It flopped on release. It found its cult. Now it deserves yours.
3. Dolores Claiborne (1995) Directed by Taylor Hackford | Kat’s Pick
If you think of Stephen King adaptations and picture blood, clowns, or corridors, Dolores Claiborne will reset your expectations entirely. Based on King’s 1992 novel and adapted by Tony Gilroy, this is a psychological thriller built almost entirely on character – specifically, a towering, lived-in performance from Kathy Bates that stands among the finest work of her career.
Dolores is a housekeeper on a Maine island accused of murdering the elderly woman she has cared for. The arrival of her estranged daughter (Jennifer Jason Leigh) unlocks eighteen years of buried secrets, shuttling between past and present with remarkable clarity. David Strathairn is quietly menacing as a detective with an old grudge, and Christopher Plummer lends the film further weight.
This one slipped under the radar on release, overshadowed by bigger King properties. That’s a genuine injustice. A film this carefully made, this emotionally honest about the things women endure and the lengths they’ll go to protect the people they love, deserves to be rediscovered. A must-watch.
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4. The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) Directed by John McTiernan | Simon’s Pick
Style, wit, and chemistry – the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair has them in abundance. Pierce Brosnan plays Crown, a billionaire who steals art not for the money but for the thrill. Rene Russo plays Catherine Banning, the insurance investigator sent to recover it. What follows is a game of mutual seduction in which neither player is quite sure whether they’re the cat or the mouse.
McTiernan shoots the whole thing like a fashion shoot crossed with a heist film – sun-drenched, sharply tailored, and knowingly playful. The central con involving a room full of men in bowler hats and matching coats is one of the great sequences of 1990s blockbuster cinema.
But what lifts the film above its genre peers is the adult intelligence of the central relationship: two equally matched, equally ruthless people trying to outwit each other while falling genuinely in love.
Slick, seductive, and enormously fun. Exactly what cinema should be on a Friday night.
5. Dark City (1998) Directed by Alex Proyas | AJ’s Pick
A man wakes in a hotel bathtub with no memory of who he is and a body on the floor. The city he moves through is beautiful and decaying, and it has never, not once, seen daylight.
Released a full year before The Matrix, Dark City asks the same questions about identity, memory, and constructed reality, but does so with a darker, more operatic sensibility rooted in film noir and German Expressionism.
Rufus Sewell is John Murdoch, hunted by both the police (William Hurt) and a group of pale, silent figures known only as the Strangers. Kiefer Sutherland is extraordinary as Dr Schreber, a doctor who knows far more than he’s letting on. Jennifer Connelly brings warmth to a world almost entirely without it.
The Matrix’s production team actually used Dark City’s sets for several sequences, and you can feel the kinship in every rain-slicked alley. But where The Matrix became a cultural phenomenon, Dark City vanished almost immediately at the box office.
Its cult following grew slowly, patiently, just like the film itself. Seek out the Director’s Cut, which removes an explanatory opening narration and trusts you, rightly, to find your own way in.
6. The Mosquito Coast (1986) Directed by Peter Weir | GB’s Pick
This is the film where Harrison Ford tried to burn his own goodwill to the ground – and nearly succeeded. In the middle of his run as one of Hollywood’s most beloved heroes, Ford took on Allie Fox – a brilliant, charismatic, and profoundly dangerous idealist who uproots his family from America and drags them deep into the jungles of Central America to build a utopia. He’s wrong about almost everything. And gets people killed. He never admits it.
Based on Paul Theroux’s novel and adapted by Paul Schrader, the film is a masterclass in the creeping horror of watching someone you love become someone you fear.
River Phoenix as Charlie, Allie’s son, carries the emotional weight of every scene, his growing disillusionment rendered with a precision extraordinary in a teenager. Peter Weir shoots the jungle with a beauty that never quite disguises its menace, and Maurice Jarre’s score is hauntingly strange.
It’s one of the most underrated films of the entire decade – and it deserves far more attention than it has ever received.
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What a great selection!