Entertainment
10 Forgotten Movies That Have the Most Fun
There are so many movies out there that it’s no wonder that many of them have been forgotten. Not that they all deserve to be remembered: many forgotten movies are so cheap and poorly made that it’s no wonder why they’ve essentially disappeared. Then there are those forgotten movies that deserve to be remembered, those that should be a lot more popular simply for how much fun they have.
Westerns, raunchy rom-coms, and time loop action movies are all represented here. Among the most enjoyable forgotten movies are filmmakers who are among the most acclaimed. Their movies listed here may not always rank highly in their filmographies, but they clearly had a lot of fun making them. These are ten movies that have been forgotten, but have the most fun.
‘That Man from Rio’ (1964)
A French farce spy satire that pulls influence from everything from James Bond to The Adventures of Tintin, That Man from Rio is a comical globe-trotting adventure movie with all the right moves. Directed by prolific filmmaker Phillipe de Broca and starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, best known for Jean-Luc Godard‘s Breathless, The Man from Rio is light, breezy entertainment that’s a ton of fun for anyone who enjoys adventure movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Belmondo plays Adrien, an airman on leave who gets pulled into an international conspiracy and treasure hunt involving an Amazonian statue MacGuffin when his fiancée is kidnapped. While That Man from Rio was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, its profile outside cinephile circles is far too low. It’s a stylish yet silly adventure movie that features hair-raising stunts and fun set pieces.
‘Going in Style’ (1979)
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Heist films are always a good bit of fun, and when the heisters happen to be three grumpy old men, it’s a real treat. Going in Style is the oft-forgotten feature film debut of director Martin Brest, who would go on to direct the ’80s action comedy classics Beverly Hills Cop and Midnight Run. The same assured direction he brought to those films is on full display in his debut film as well, which stars the legendary trio of George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg. It’s one of the earliest, and best, entries into the crimes of the elderly subgenre.
Burns, Carney and Strasberg are three retirees living in New York City who decide that the best way to break up the monotony of their golden years is to do a little armed robbery. Unlike some of the later films of this kind featuring over-the-hill criminals, Going in Style is more than just cheap jokes and actually becomes quite melancholy by the end. It’s a bittersweet comedy with three old pros giving perfectly pitched performances. Skip the bland 2017 remake, and have way more fun with the forgotten original.
‘Used Cars’ (1980)
Before they made one of the most essential comedies of the ’80s with Back to the Future, filmmaking duo Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale collaborated on two supremely underrated comedies. They debuted with the sweet Beatlemania movie I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and then followed it up with the sleazy salesmen comedy Used Cars. Featuring an early adult role for Kurt Russell, then mostly known for his work in Disney movies, it’s a raunchy madcap movie that’s just as fun as the other ’80s comedy classic which steamrolled it at the box office, Airplane!
Russell plays Rudy, a cunning, conning car salesman who works for the kindly Luke (Jack Warden). When Luke dies of a heart attack, Rudy and his co-workers must do everything in their power to keep the dealership alive and out of the hands of Luke’s evil brother Roy (also Warden). There’s a ton of fun to be had in Used Cars, from the brilliant set-ups and payoffs in Zemeckis and Gale’s script, the underrated comic cast, and the epic comic climax featuring 250 cars racing across the desert with student drivers behind the wheels.
‘Without a Clue’ (1988)
Sherlock Holmes is certainly a character that can be mined for some fun material. The many movies based on the Arthur Conan Doyle character have offered a range of different interpretations. One of the most fun, and forgotten, interpretations of the character came in the ’80s comedy Without a Clue, starring Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley as Holmes and Dr. Watson, respectively. Directed by Thom Eberhardt, who also helmed the ’80s cult classic Night of the Comet, the film offers a delightful twist on the iconic characters that provides ample entertainment.
In this version of the mystery-solving duo, Watson is the actual crime solver who has hired an actor named Reginald Kincaid to portray Holmes in order to protect his medical career. Watson finds he can’t actually rid himself of the blowhard Kincaid due to the reputation built around the character of Holmes, and when a new case involving the infamous Professor Moriarty (Paul Freeman) arises, the two must reluctantly team up again. Without a Clue is a super fun inversion of its classic characters, and Caine and Kingsley have dynamite antagonistic chemistry together.
‘I Love You to Death’ (1990)
A completely forgotten black comedy, I Love You to Death is an underrated effort from acclaimed filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan with a completely stacked cast. From top to bottom, it features Kevin Kline (with an over-the-top Italian accent), Tracey Ullman, River Phoenix, Joan Plowright and, most memorably, William Hurt and Keanu Reeves as two stoner hitmen. Based on a bizarre true story of infidelity and attempted murder, the movie is the kind of macabre fun that should’ve guaranteed it the cult status that has so far eluded it.
Kline plays Joey, who owns a pizza parlor with his wife Rosalie (Ullman). Joey is also a habitual cheater, and when Rosalie finds out, she decides to kill Joey but discovers that the task is easier said than done. Multiple, increasingly comical, murder attempts ensue, and while the film’s pacing can sometimes drag, the talented cast holds it all together. Everyone is having a blast in their roles, with Kline, Reeves and Hurt getting the most moments to flex their comedic muscles. I Love You to Death will definitely appeal to any fans of similar killer cult comedies like A Fish Called Wanda and Throw Momma from the Train.
‘Matinee’ (1993)
Director Joe Dante has had a wonderfully idiosyncratic directorial career. Adjacent to but distinct from his peers who came up in the same era, Dante shares the nostalgia of Steven Spielberg and the anarchic spirit of John Landis. His films often mixed B-movie genre elements with cartoon logic, sharp satire and meta-humor. Dante is a one-of-a-kind director, and while his films almost all range from genuine hits (Gremlins) to beloved cult classics (The Burbs), his most personal, the coming-of-age comedy Matinee, is a forgotten classic.
Set in Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the film is Dante’s love letter to the atomic monster movies of his youth. John Goodman gives another overlooked performance as Lawrence Woolsey, a shock-and-schlock filmmaker modeled after the famous B-movie director William Castle. Woolsey goes to Key West to premiere his new movie, Mant. With a cast of hormone-addled teens and nuclear-panicked adults, the film is a charming homage to a bygone era of filmmaking and a loving recreation of a very specific time and place in America.
‘The Hudsucker Proxy’ (1994)
Just as Dante paid homage to his cinematic influences in Matinee, the Coen Brothers do the same with theirs in the highly underrated screwball comedy The Hudsucker Proxy. Co-written with fellow filmmaker Sam Raimi, the film is a more successful attempt at mixing influences than their previous collaboration, Crimewave. Where that film was The Three Stooges meets Hitchcock, The Hudsucker Proxy is a more clever combination of Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, and Howard Hawks with boundless energy, incredible production design and fantastic performances. It doesn’t get much more fun than this.
Tim Robbins plays a small-town man with big ideas, Norville Barnes, cut from the same cloth as George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. He’s gobbled up by the Sturges-esque cynical world of big business, where he becomes the proxy president at Hudsucker Industries, while he also catches the eye of fast-talking reporter Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh channeling Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell). The Hudsucker Proxy was a box office failure and received mixed reviews from critics, and while its cult status is growing, it’s still one of the most forgotten films by one of the most influential directing duos.
‘The Quick and the Dead’ (1995)
The year after The Hudsucker Proxy bombed, Raimi himself had his own box office misfire with the wild, wild Western The Quick and the Dead. Featuring an incredible cast of stars who were both rising and at the height of their powers at the time, and Raimi’s characteristic inventive camerawork, it’s a crazy fun popcorn Western that has a one-of-a-kind style within the genre. Within Raimi’s career, The Quick and the Dead is dead center in the decade that’s most overlooked, coming after his cult classic Evil Dead trilogy and before his superhero Spider-Man trilogy.
Sharon Stone plays a mysterious drifter called the Lady who enters a small-town quick-draw competition as a means to exact vengeance on the mayor, John Herod (Gene Hackman). The competition also includes outlaw-turned-preacher Cort (Russell Crowe) and the slick-tongued Kid (a young Leonardo DiCaprio). There’s also a murderer’s row of character actors filling out the rest of the competition slots, and the sequences themselves are Raimi operating at his most visually exaggerated.
‘The Sweetest Thing’ (2002)
Raunchy, adult comedies made a big comeback in the late ’90s and 2000s, built on the backs of filmmakers like the Farrelly Brothers and movies like American Pie. These films would almost universally focus on men behaving badly, all the way until Bridesmaids broke the filthy glass ceiling in 2011. Except that The Sweetest Thing did it nine years earlier. Combining the dirty talk of Sex and the City with the juvenile humor of South Park, which writer Nancy M. Pimental wrote for, the film is unapologetic, low-brow fun.
Cameron Diaz plays the ringleader of her friend group, which includes Christina Applegate and Selma Blair, whose strictly single policy is threatened when she meets uglies with a charming man played by Thomas Jane. Thus, a chaotic road trip ensues along with various misadventures featuring glory holes, raunchy songs, and clothing montages. The Sweetest Thing received negative reviews and was generally treated more harshly than many of the male-led raunchy comedies of the era, but it deserves some love for blazing a fun, foul-mouthed trail for female-led films like Bridesmaids, Girls Trip, and Booksmart.
‘Undercover Brother’ (2002)
Blaxploitation as a genre has inspired a lot of far more intelligent discourse than will be offered here. Simply put, there’s a fair amount of debate over where the lines of representation and exploitation cross in those films and what their ultimate impact was. It’s had an undeniable effect on many filmmakers, and also inspired many parodies and homages, like I’m Gonna Git You Sucka and Black Dynamite. Belonging in the same class as those films is the forgotten 2000s comedy Undercover Brother.
Based on an animated internet series, the film treats Blaxploitation the same way Austin Powers treated ’60s spy movies: there’s a lot of love for the genre underneath its satire. Eddie Griffin plays the titular character, a radical hero recruited by the B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D. to help fight “The Man.” Obviously, there’s a lot of deliberately offensive humor in Undercover Brother—some of it has aged poorly, but there are also a lot of undeniably funny and clever moments. The cast is incredible, with great supporting roles for both Dave Chappelle and Neil Patrick Harris that predate the resurgence of both their careers.
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