Love Repoman and They Live! Culty classics.
Moon, Sunshine, Dog Soldiers (though its more horror action), Paul (comedy sci-fi), attack the block, Threads... Best genre for me.
I heard Equilibrium was stifled by people who opposed the anti-religious nature of the movie. The more I think about it the more it makes sense. It could have been a much bigger deal at the time. (Same goes for The Golden Compass.)
The wiki summary of The American Astronaut is absolutely bonkers. Then realizing that it was released on DVD post-2000 and not pre-1975 is even more crazy!
"underrated" and "movies that never get the credit they deserve" seems a bit hard to define. But at least subjectively I disagree with placing some of these movies on this list.
Asteroid City: can a movie that has just barely come out even be considered "underrated"? Feels like not enough time has passed for public opinion to truly form. Besides that it feels like it gets plenty of credit being a Wes Anderson movie.
Under the skin: bombed in the box office as far as I know, but imo also isn't easily accessible for the average viewer and not mainstream. But it does seem to get plenty of praise from the critic side, so I don't see it as underrated from this perspective.
Solaris and Stalker: again I don't think they are underrated by critics and are highly praised. Just not movies that are easily accessible for the average viewer.
Paprika and ghost under the shell: are both a bit niche simply by being anime, but at least from the critic side I don't see them as being underrated. I think ghost in the shell is reasonably known, Paprika maybe a bit less. So that could fit.
Donnie Darko: is a cult classic that definitely has a decent sized following. It's maybe not a mainstream hit, but imo I wouldnt call it underrated.
What I would agree with is "Ad Astra". Definitely flawed and not perfect, but I still liked it quite a bit. So at least from my biased perspective it would count as being underrated
Asteroid City's "play within a play" and that unnerving chant at the end was it's undoing. None of that needed to be there, but the movie would have been too short without it.
The Langoliers needed to be trimmed down. It was broadcast as two large chunks: it needed to be leaner. Still, Bronson Pinchot uncontrollably tearing strips of paper will always be a haunting image.
Produced by Japan's Toho (famously the studio of the Godzilla films), it's an end-of-the-world flick featuring a frankly astonishing international cast in what could be considered a "conference room drama" -- bottled-up high stakes human interaction in a true dystopic end to humanity. I can't figure how I never saw this back in the 80s; I only discovered it recently and I was blown away.
I'll second The Andromeda Strain, it's also a "conference room drama" and it really works. James Olson was a hugely underrated actor of the era.
Colossus: The Forbin Project, also wire-taut conference room drama with imminent destruction hanging on every decision.
And while we're at it, War Games, probably the best known of all these films, and maybe the only one that doesn't merit the categorization as a conference-room drama. But the stakes are the same.
My underrated picks would be **Melancholia **(2011) about a planet passing unsettlingly close to the Earth during a wedding, and **Coherence **(2013) about a group of friends gathering for a dinner party on an evening when a comet is passing overhead.
Typing this out I realise they actually both sound quite similar but I promise you they are very, very different and worth a watch.