10 Massively Underrated Movies From The 1990s

8. Heavenly Creatures

Heavenly Creatures
Miramax Films

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.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!