10 Recent Underrated Movies That Deserve A Second Chance
These movies might have passed you by initially, but they demand your time.
Sometimes, for whatever reason, movies just don’t stick with audiences. Often, the reason is simply because they’re bad, but at other times, they deserve a lot better than they got. Either because of poor marketing, a bad release window, or a lack of a name brand actor, great movies can easily get overlooked.
This list takes a look back at the past five years, picking out which films have been unfairly missed.
Sometimes, films achieve great scores from the critics but don’t get bums on seats, and other times they manage to gross enough money but receive poor critical scores and disappear quickly from pop culture.
Huge smash hits like Joker getting so-so critical scores have obviously been discounted, in favour of films the majority of movie goers might genuinely have missed.
These are the sorts of movies you might have seen advertised, but they didn’t catch your attention and have since faded from memory. Even if they didn’t make a big impact at the time though, they’re definitely worth going back for a second look now, before those end-of-the-decade lists are locked in for good.
10. Overlord
Kicking off here with a movie that at least made a profit, but with a gross of $41 million from a $38 million budget, only by the slimmest of margins. Still, that's better than some here, as we'll see soon.
Overlord had a bigger budget than you might expect from a horror movie, and had they been able to keep costs down, that $41 million would look much rosier. The pitch for the film though, with American soldiers dropped in Nazi territory and encountering zombies, is perfectly simple and comes with bags of potential. While Overlord didn't fully capitalise on it, it wasn't a total disaster either, and deserves more credit than it got.
The Nazi zombies angle draws obvious Call Of Duty parallels, though it's far more measured and creepy than that. There are, however, plenty of video game similarities to be seen, with the absorbingly dark environments, well shot stealth sequences and over the top villainy feeling like something from a console triple A.
Like many horror films, characters sometimes act in strange ways to expedite the plot, and you have to just go with it on the Nazi zombies thing after Dead Snow. If you can manage that though, you'll probably enjoy Overlord.