Written by contributor Christina ‘DZA’ Marie
It’s always sad when you find a great movie you want to talk about with your friends, only to find that they’ve either never heard of it or, worse, have heard that it’s a bad movie. But sometimes a movie is not inherently bad. Sometimes it’s just not what the audience is expecting, and they react poorly to it.
Obviously opinion is not fact, and plenty of people will disagree with my picks here. But if you’ve never heard of these movies—or heard bad things about them—I encourage you to watch them yourself and decide on your own.
She-Devil (1989)
A housewife named Ruth finds out that her husband is cheating on her with Meryl Streep. (I mean, I get that it’s Meryl Streep, but still, dick move.) After he leaves her and the kids to further pursue his mistress, Ruth decides to get revenge.
I love this movie because of the way Ruth goes about her revenge. She doesn’t use violence, doesn’t hurt anyone, but gets her revenge by empowering herself and the women around her. She works at a retirement home to get close to Streep’s mother and turns it into paradise for the elderly patients. She helps her husband’s other mistress get revenge by helping her report his financial crimes to the IRS. And she starts an employment agency for downtrodden women, many of them in law enforcement, who are happy to give her slimeball ex-husband a notoriously harsh judge.
Also, Meryl Streep plays a super exaggerated author who lives in a pink palace and writes cliched romance novels. It’s just a really cute, goofy movie.
Resident Evil (2002)
This one has a special place in my heart for being the first R-rated movie I ever saw, and secured my love for zombies.
Based on the video game, Alice wakes up with no memory and winds up in a secret, illegal underground lab with a security team. The computer went nuts and murdered the hundreds of employees, also releasing a gas that knocked Alice out and temporarily wiped her memory. Turns out, the computer did it because they’d been exposed to something called the T-virus, which turns them into zombies. Alice and the team have just over an hour to get out before they’re buried alive.
Super simple, super old CGI, super great movie. It’s a cult classic, as is the sequel: Resident Evil: Apocalypse. But not the other sequels. You can ignore those.
Unleashed (2005)
Jet Li stars as an abused crime dog. Literally. His “owner” collars him and treats him as a dog, sending him after men he needs beaten up. When they’re caught in a car crash, Li escapes and runs into Morgan Freeman, who shows him what a real family is supposed to be.
Featuring: amazing fight scenes, found family, and zero romantic subplot. Freeman’s character has a step-daughter who, in any other film, would be playing the romantic interest. But while she definitely loves Li’s character, it’s a sisterly love.
Also hidden among the angst and action are some genuinely funny moments as Li navigates the world outside of crime and violence. His introduction to ice cream is particularly hilarious, and cute.
Jennifer’s Body (2009)
I truly don’t understand why so many people hated this movie. Maybe because it had the same writer as Juno and they didn’t like the genre shift to horror. This was also one of the first comedy-horror movies, so people probably weren’t sure how to react to a film like that. Although this is technically horror, it’s not really scary. It’s more of a comedic tragedy.
If you haven’t heard, Jennifer’s Body is about a teen girl Jennifer (played by Megan Fox) who is sacrificed by a boy band looking for fame. But because she’s not a virgin, she comes back as a demon, and spends the rest of the movie eating boys to maintain her strength.
The emotional core of the movie is Jennifer’s friendship with Anita (played by Amanda Seyfried), who gradually figures out what’s going on, and then has to figure out what to do about it. She maintains that Jennifer is her best friend and she owes it to her to find some other solution than outright killing her, and gradually comes to the conclusion that Jennifer was never her friend.
Unfriended (2015)
Another horror movie—this one actually scary. One year ago, a teen girl committed suicide after an embarrassing video of her was leaked online that led to rampant levels of cyberbullying. On the first anniversary of her death, her friends are Skyping online, and end up being haunted by the girl they drove to suicide. One by one, she possesses and kills them all.
This movie is low-budget, with very few special effects, and very good acting. It’s not filmed traditionally, as the entire thing is fixed on the main character’s computer screen. We see only what she sees, which the directors use to their advantage.
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)
The story of King Arthur has been done and redone a hundred times. To the point that any new additions are caught between a rock and a hard place. If they stick to the script, they’re labelled unoriginal and overdone. If they try something new, they’re accused to betraying the “original vision.” (Although if you try to research the “original” King Arthur story, you’ll find about five centuries of fanfiction on a historical event that probably didn’t happen.)
Guy Ritchie chose Option B: he took the basic story and changed everything else. Mordred is a warlock killed in the first ten minutes by Arthur’s father. Arthur’s uncle is the villain. Arthur’s sorcerer ally is an unnamed acolyte of Merlin, and a no-nonsense woman to boot.
While the movie has some flaws—namely an overabundance of characters that could’ve been cut or combined—it’s still an amazing re-telling of a classic tale. Arthur is raised in a brothel by prostitutes and starts the movie as a crime lord who looks after the downtrodden. His friends are all goofballs, and also hardened criminals and killers. The sword in the stone actually gives Arthur magic powers. I downloaded the entire soundtrack on my phone because it’s some of the best music I’ve ever heard.
I only felt cheated when I found out the creators had planned on doing a couple of sequels, but didn’t because this first movie didn’t perform as well as they’d hoped. Now we’ll never see Guy Ritchie’s take on Guinevere and Lancelot, which is a crying shame.
Tomb Raider (2018)
An origin story of everyone’s favourite puzzle-solving grave robber, Tomb Raider is Lara Croft’s origin story. Her father disappeared some years ago, and now she finally has a clue as to where he might have gone: a lost island off the coast of Japan, where an ancient empress is buried.
The downside is this empress is said to have killed thousands of people with just a touch, and the bad guys are trying to dig her up to claim that power for themselves.
Most of the movie is Lara getting in and out of tricky situations while she tries to find her dad and avoid getting shot by villains. The last act, when they go into the empress’s tomb, is more traditional Tomb Raider puzzle-solving while simultaneously wrapping up the emotional core of the story.
