The 100 Most Underappreciated Films: Part Three.
By Darren Williams
14th August 2009

21. After-life (1998; Kore-eda Hirokazu)

After-life takes place in a sort of halfway house in purgatory. Between life and death, you are given a few days to pick one moment from your life, one memory to relive over and over for all eternity. The house is run by celestial social workers who help each newly dead person work through their own individual problems and pick their memory, they then aid in recreating the memory for them. That's about it as far as a narrative goes. What's important in After-life are the little moments, the beauty that makes up a person's life. It's philosophical without being preachy and it asks you to remember what's important in life. It's a beautiful and thought-provoking film, one of the finest examples of Asian cinema from the last 15 years or so and a touching tale of love and memory.

22. The Baby (1973; Ted Post)

This is one of the oddest films you could ever wish to see. It starts out as a seemingly realistic study of a social worker attempting to help a dysfunctional family she's investigating for child abuse, only to quickly descend into all out weirdness. When she visits the family she realises the "child" in question is a mentally retarded, adult man, who lives with his mother and sisters who treat him like a baby. They keep him in nappies, breast feed him and keep him sleeping in a crib. The social worker decides to help, but are her reasons solely altruistic? The Baby is sick, bizarre, distressing and wonderful, topped off by a jawdropping performance from Ruth Roman as the hideous, manipulative, abusive mother.

23. Ballad of Narayama (1983; Shohei Imamura)

This Golden Palm winner should be far better known solely for its pedigree. It takes place in a famine stricken remote mountain village in 19th Century Japan. Survival is valued over kindness, the villagers ration food, leave children to die when they have too many, kill for theft, and leave the elderly to die on Mount Narayama. The film focuses on one elderly woman, a healthy 69 year old who's about to turn 70. She accepts her fate, but she needs to complete a few tasks before she leaves, such as finding women for her sons. This is a remarkable portrait of the brutal and superstitious nature of this community, but it doesn't preach, it just gives us the situation and allows us to decide for ourself. It's frightening, gripping, but surprisingly tender and meditative. It's pure poetry.

24. A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969; Bill Melendez)

Everyone should have some familiarity with the Peanuts cartoons, if you like them then you should know and love this film, if you don't like them then you should give this a try as it could be the film to change your mind. Charlie Brown becomes briefly adored when he wins the school spelling bee. When he's told he now has to win the national one as well, reality sinks in and that familiar desperation returns. The plot is flimsy and the joy is in the brief vignettes that really make up the film. This is probably the most faithful recreation of the comics and it's a thing of sheer pleasure.

25. Crippled Masters (1979; Joe Law)

In ancient China, a ruthless warlord tortures and maims the followers who let him down. That's how the plot tells us that one of our heroes lost his legs and the other his arms. In reality they were actually born with these disabilities, we follow these unusual heroes as they train themselves in martial arts and seek vengeance on the evil warlord. If the heroes were mocked this could be offensive, but they are very talented martial artists and they're our identification figures. We cheer them on as they battle the evil warlord and we never feel as if they're being mistreated because of their disabilities. So despite the dubious premise, it's a film that leaves you in absolute admiration of these two remarkable men.

26. Death Laid an Egg (1968; Giulio Questi)

Also known as Plucked! Death Laid an Egg is one of the most bizarre entries in the giallo subgenre. Set around a poultry farm, the owner, Marco, has a habit of murdering prostitutes for fun. Marco hatches a plan with a beautiful young woman to murder his wife in order to take complete ownership of the chicken farm, only for a series of odd plot twists to occur. It's an outrageous and audacious film, packed with deliciously demented plot twists that manages to walk that fine line between gloriously demented and obnoxious with ease.

27. Flaming Creatures (1963; Jack Smith)

Flaming Creatures is one of the legendary, experimental underground movies. Shot in black and white, this plotless gem follows guests at an arcane orgy. It caused censorship controversy at the time of it's original release, but time has tamed its excesses somewhat. What's left is an apocalyptic, hallucinatory difficult, intensely sexual piece of art cinema that everyone should see once, even if it's just to dismiss it as pretentious nonsense.

28. The Ghost Camera (1933; Bernard Vorhaus)

A wonderful quota-quickie thriller. A camera happens to lands in the back of a passing car belong to chemist Henry Kendall. Kendall develops the film and goes searching for the woman in the picture (a very young Ida Lupino) He discovers that the camera belongs to Lupino's brother (John Mills ) but he's gone missing. Lupino and Kendall join forces to discover her missing brother and find themselves in the middle of a police investigation of a murder where Mills looks like the most likely culprit. The quota quickies are often dismissed because of the cheap nature of their production, but there's been a revival in recent years (thanks to the likes of Matthew Sweet) and The Ghost Camera deserves to be remembered as one of the jewels of the sub-genre.

29. The Man and the Snake (1972; Sture Rydman)

Charming short ghost story adapted from the Ambrose Bierce classic. Rydman is a bit of an obscure figure, with the imdb only listing two directorial credits (this and the equally wonderful short, The Return) The Man and the Snake focuses on a man with a deathly terror of snakes spending the night with a poisonous snake under his bed. Rydman manages to capture the feel of the legendary BBC Ghost Story for Christmas series in both of these shorts, which means slow-paced gems that rely on atmosphere and character to deliver scares rather than sudden jump moments.

30. The Triple Echo (1972; Michael Apted)

Set in the countryside in wartime England, Alice (Glenda Jackson) is a farm owner who meets a soldier (Brian Deacon) He becomes a regular visitor to her farm and they fall in love, leading to him going AWOL. To avoid suspicion he dresses as a woman and pretends to be her sister, taking the film into bizarre territory, leading to tragedy when a military police officer (Oliver Reed) decides he wants to takes him out dancing. The odd concept could have seen the film lose its way and become little more than a camp melodrama, but solid performances from the leads help to anchor it in reality and make it a surprisingly believable tale. ,