10 Underrated Science Fiction Movies You Must See

Writer-director Richard Stanley's 1990 feature debut can easily be classed as much as a horror movie as science fiction. It's also looked down on in some quarters due to controversy over its origins; though Stanley initially passed the story off as his own, legal action by the publishers of 2000AD forced him to concede that he lifted a lot of it from Shok!, a story which ran in the British comic a decade earlier.

These misgivings aside, it's hard to deny that Stanley's film does a tremendous job presenting a nightmarish yet eerily plausible future on a limited budget. Hardware looked set to launch the director as a major player in genre filmmaking in the 1990s, until the debacle of The Island of Dr Moreau stopped that dead.

While its primary focus is on a killer droid unwittingly set loose in an apartment building, the real power and horror of Hardware is in its world-building: an irradiated, overpopulated dystopia, where the prevalance of technology seems to have finally robbed the world of all its humanity.

While its late 1980s cyberpunk aesthetics might seem a little dated, Hardware is still an enthralling, thought-provoking, and often genuinely unsettling work.

Plus, Stanley's hardly alone in admitting to lifting material from elsewhere; James Cameron has also long since been forced to do likewise over similarities between The Terminator and an episode of TV's The Outer Limits written by prominent SF author Harlan Ellison.