Hidden Sci-Fi Gems On HBO Max You Need To Watch

At its very core, science fiction is weird. Aliens, space, time travel, cloning, hybrid monsters — these are not everyday things so much as they are absurd, and it's exceedingly rare that a science-fiction property admits as much to the audience and presents itself as what it is, which is a strange story set in a baffling world. "Time Bandits" is one of those movies, a sci-fi fantasy adventure directed by Terry Gilliam and co-starring his old Monty Python friends John Cleese and Michael Palin. 

This "Doctor Who" meets "Bill and Ted" tale concerns 11-year-old history buff Kevin (Craig Warnock), who, after being surprised in his room one night by a group of time-traveling little people, follows them into a void that opens up in his house. Suddenly, they're all hopping through time and space together, trying to keep their time map safe from both the Supreme Being (rendered as a floating head) and the manifestation of Evil, who each desire to manipulate time for their own reasons. All the while, Kevin and friends meet heavily satirized historical and folk figures, such as Napoleon and Robin Hood. "Time Bandits" is also visually stunning, with one-of-a-kind, quaint, sometimes cheap-looking special effects.

The horror-comedy "Shaun of the Dead" is about some underachieving slacker types who stage a counterattack against zombies from their local British pub. "Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel" is like the sci-fi version of "Shaun of the Dead," subbing out the undead with the spectacular manipulation of time. Comic actors Chris O'Dowd, Marc Wootton, and Dean Lennox Kelly portray a trio of bored, go-nowhere friends who pop into the pub for a pint one night and ultimately find themselves crossing paths with Cassie (Anna Faris), a woman whose claim that she's from the future holds weight when one of them uncovers a time hole that gives them a look into the pub in the future ... where everyone is dead, including them. 

Here, the movie shifts gears and becomes a murder whodunit, only the victims themselves have to figure out who or what killed them, or rather who will kill them, if their multiple trips back and forward in time don't work out correctly. All the while, they've got to avoid alternate versions of themselves and try their best not to create those dreaded time paradoxes.

Even if you haven't seen "Scanners," you're probably familiar with the film's most famous sequence: the pre-GIF-era image of a bald guy in a suit whose head suddenly explodes into a bloody mess. While taken totally out of context, that actually provides a very good idea of what "Scanners," written and directed by famously provocative filmmaker David Cronenberg ("Dead Ringers," "The Fly") is all about. In the world of the film there exists an ostracized subculture of "scanners," the now-adult offspring of women who took an unproven sleep aid during pregnancy; they possess the abilities to read minds, manipulate minds, and also make them explode. Darryl Revok, an especially powerful scanner, infiltrates a military company's event and blows up the head of one of their hired scanners. Darryl aims to unite scanners and take over the world, and it's up to his brother, Cameron, a reluctant scanner driven mad by his powers, to stop him. "Scanners" is rife with weird mind control sequences, exploding heads, and, of course, a telepathic battle for the ages between brothers.

Douglas Adams' freewheeling, satirical, wildly funny outer-space epic "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" entered the sci-fi pantheon in 1978 as a BBC Radio series, and it's been adapted for the stage, the small screen, a five-book series, and in 2005, a standalone, star-studded feature film. 

A take on the first book, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" follows the adventures of Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman) — a regular English guy who discovers that road crews are about to tear down his house to expand a highway ... and then that the Earth itself is scheduled to be blown up by the interstellar Vogon race to build a space bypass. He gets that news from his friend Ford Prefect (Yasiin Bey), who reveals himself to be an alien traveling the cosmos with the aid of the pithy "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," a space guidebook that looks like and predates an iPad. 

As they sometimes literally falls and tumbles through space, Arthur and Ford align themselves with Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell), a two-headed rogue of a galactic president who stole the sophisticated Heart of Gold spaceship (outfitted with an "Improbability Drive" and staffed by a depressed robot named Marvin the Paranoid Android) in search of the answer to the ultimate question of "life, the universe, and everything." Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called the film "hugely likable," and David Edelstein of Slate found it "an extremely pleasant, consistently amusing diversion."

Apocalypse movies, in all their many forms, are always a fascinating slice of science fiction. Not only do filmmakers imagine and flesh out the terrifying idea of the world coming apart due to some kind of doomsday catastrophe, but it's interesting to examine the toll such an event would have on the human psyche, regardless of the form the end of days takes. 

In "Blindness," director Fernando Meirelles (best known for acclaimed dramas like "City of God," "The Constant Gardener," and "The Two Popes") presents a creepy sci-fi thriller about "white sickness," a rapidly spreading disease that robs whoever gets it of their sight. A doctor (known only as "Doctor") played by Mark Ruffalo is left blind, and he's sent to a government-run camp with his still-seeing wife (Julianne Moore), where things are falling apart as quickly as they are on the outside. It's up to her to lead the resistance while also avoiding that white sickness. "'Blindness,'" according to Namrata Joshi of Outlook, "manages to communicate the sense of deep-rooted paranoia and anxiety to its audience," which is perfect for anyone hoping to watch some unsettling sci-fi.

Unfortunately, there aren't many sci-fi movies based on the work of a Nobel laureate — but that just makes "Never Let Me Go," adapted from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, all the more special. Dreamlike, visually exquisite, and deeply thoughtful about what it means to be a human being, "Never Let Me Go" seems like a period piece or an art movie until the viewer realizes it takes place in a hypothetical and slightly dystopian past. Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth, who are the best of friends, attend a rural British boarding school. When they leave to make their way in the world, however, they learn they're the result of a government-sponsored experiment in cloning. According to Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, "Never Let Me Go" "has ideas; it resists categorization, and it lingers in the mind." Much of that staying power comes from its tender exploration of the human need to connect and love each other, against all odds.

Guillermo del Toro, the Oscar-winning visionary behind works like "The Shape of Water," "Pacific Rim," "Hellboy," and "Pan's Labyrinth" made his auspicious debut in English-language film with 1997's "Mimic." An expertly unsettling riff off 1950s B-movies featuring hyper-intelligent killer insects, "Mimic" is a chilling delight that remains unknown to many of the celebrated director's fans.

A wave of disease spread by cockroaches is killing off the kids of New York City. Entomologist Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) springs into action, engineering a counter-race of bugs calibrated to kill off the plague-bearing roaches. It works — but unfortunately, Tyler's "Judas" bugs evolve.  What's worse, they get really good at mimicry, which makes their quest to kill off humanity all the more possible. "'Mimic' will have entomophobes in the audience yearning to bug out," said Carol Buckland of CNN, "and scare-seekers squirming in their seats." In short, it's a perfectly creepy slice of Guillermo del Toro's early filmography.