10 Massively Underrated Movies From The 1990s
8. Heavenly Creatures
Believe it or not, but Peter Jackson did actually make movies before the Lord Of The Rings trilogy - and some pretty good ones, at that.
His 1994 thriller Heavenly Creatures stars a fresh-faced Kate Winslet in her feature debut, and tells the real-life story of the 1954 Parker-Hulme murder case, in which two teenage girls formed a plan to kill one of their mothers.
At face value, it sounds like it's going to be one of those straightforward thrillers we've all seen a thousand times, but because Jackson is obviously a fantasy lover at heart, he infuses the movie with some refreshing touches - like a sequence in which Pauline, one of the girls, imagines herself in an alternate world, in order to escape the boredom of having sex with a boy.
It's very weird... but somehow, it works.
The film received Oscar nominations, critical acclaim, and was a darling on the festival circuit, but none of that goodwill translated into financial success, and it ultimately flopped hard. Combined with the fact that people seem to forget Jackson's pre-Lord Of The Rings career, and Heavenly Creatures has vanished into obscurity over the years - but it's very much worth rediscovering.