10 Great Sci-Fi Movies With Terrible Concepts

If you left the cinema after seeing Ridley Scott's classic "haunted house in space sci-fi horror" Alien and thought, "that would have been better if the alien tried to have sex with its victims before killing them off", then congratulations, you could have come up with the premise for 1995's Roger Donaldson film, Species!

Following the murderous trail of a shape-shifting alien human hybrid who is searching for a human male to mate with and then consume, the film's corny conceit sounds laughable. After all, the monstrous villain of John Carpenter's The Thing would probably not be as threatening if it was slinking around in an evening dress.

But...

Whilst the premise of "Alien, if the Xenormorph had some added sex appeal" isn’t a film anyone was asking for, the film is surprisingly tense, scary good fun.

After all, it just takes some basic audience psychology to note that characters are never more vulnerable than when they're in the nip and ready to get down and dirty. As such, making this film's victims a bunch of clueless would-be Romeos rather than hardy space truckers or Antarctic explorers leaves them more exposed and more likely to be picked off, resulting in a creepy, fun sci-fi horror.