5 Best Philip K Dick Film Adaptations

1. Screamers (1995)

Again, a very stupidly named adaptation (nowhere in the story The Second Variety will you find the word "screamer") but a great one. The story follows a group of off-world soldiers engaged in a bitter war after the mining operation there went sour. The escalation of the war has grown and grown mostly through the use of self-replication robots (that has fail written all over it!).

One of the things that makes Total Recall so great is what makes Screamers so great. B-movie campiness. This movie is chock full of it. Peter Weller really delivers here. Never at any point when I first watched this movie did I feel like I had a handle on what was coming next. It's space horror before space horror was a genre except instead of a ship there's a whole planet - full of deadly robots who might be the soldier in the bunker next to you or the little orphan kid.

The Good: Peter Weller. Peter Weller. Peter Weller. With lines like this, "Jefferson are you coming or just breathing hard?" what's not to love. The theme of what and who is real is so thoroughly explored here it was nearly exhausting. And no happy endings here.

The Bad: The rest of the cast is pretty horrible. The effects make claymation look like state of the art technology. There are some pretty large plot holes here. But all of this simply adds to the campiness.

Written word to film differences: The short story is based on Earth and is a pretty heavy handed cold-war allegory. Many of the characters are new to the film (mainly for dialogue based exposition).