1. Jodorowsky's Dune
Salvador Dali being paid $100,000 an hour to play the insane emperor of the universe who s**ts into a dolphin? Check Orson Welles as a 300 pound fat man living in a castle with a giant moving mouth and tongue as the entrance? Check Set design and art direction from Dan O'Bannon and H.R Giger...the team later responsible for the look of Alien? Check A score from Pink Floyd? Check A visionary lunatic and maverick film maker obsessed with pushing cinemas capabilities to its limits and exploring the realms of what film can mean and accomplish? Check and mate. What do you get when all these super condense together? You get the daddy of unmade sci-fi; Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune. Frank Herbert's sprawling literary giant was thought unfilmable. A complex tale of warring cosmic dynasties, mythology, environmentalism and mysticism...let's face it, Dune is a work infinitely too complex to explain away here. The only way its immense narrative would ever truly be adapted would be for a filmmaker of appropriate gal and vision, with big brass balls the size of water melons, to attempt their own interpretation of the material rather than a direct telling of it. And of all the totally psychopathic film makers that have come and gone through cinemas history, Chilean- French mentalist Alejandro Jodorowsky was the perfect choice. And it got damn close to being made as well. Two million dollars of the budgets ten had been plunged into pre-production prior to the plug getting pulled. Frank Herbert visited the set in 1976 and commented that Jodorowsky's version was roughly 14-hours long with a script the size of a phone book. What's so interesting about all this is that the man behind El Topo felt in no way indebted to the source material. Rather he wanted to take extensive liberties with the themes and ideas, filtering Herbert's universe through his particularly bonkers brain. A documentary about the whole film has come out this year whilst all that exists now from the production are some extremely tantalizing and appealingly out there concept images to really get the mind racing for what could have been. Dune is without a doubt one of the greatest literary works of science fiction ever produced. Unfilmable? Quite possibly. But if I needed to pick between an indigestible 14 hour surrealist epic of otherworldly visuals and scope or the sight of Agent Dale Cooper awkwardly riding a sandworm and Sting in those pants...I know which one I'd pick...