Good Low Budget and Independent Flicks
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Tuesday, September 1, 2026 02:34
VIEWED: 28778
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Indie? You have a whole genre of exploitation film, cheesy scifi fantasy softcore horror crap made in the 1960s, 70s and 1980s, Blaxploitation, Canuxploitation, splatter, slasher, an entire genre of low-budget films produced in Canada, Aus did some too, you have lower budget animation, you have quirky films from Germany, France, Spain, Japan, lots and lots of specific genre type like 'Horror Sciif' the Revisionist Western Spaghetti genre or Weirdest Absurd/Surreal Comedy, or Zombie movies. If you can put up with the Politics you have Michael Moore's 'Where to Invade Next' the Sicko movie, Fahrenheit 9/11 he also exposed some of the politics behind the Green Energy industry, I think that one is free on youtube or vimeo or dailymotion you had lots and lots of documentary political historical stuff free on social media sites, oldest classics like Metropolis by Fritz Lang. Big hits You have
Mad Max
Friday the 13th
Nosferatu by F.W. Murnau
Dark Star
Boss Nigger
Foxy Brown
Blacula
Dolemite
Fistful of Dollars
Night of the Living Dead
Human Tornado
El Mariachi
Eraserhead
Tetsuo The Iron Man
The Devil's Backbone El espinazo del diablo
Joyeux Noël
Run Lola Run
La Haine
Young Frankenstein
Killer Clowns from Outer Space
Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
Evil Dead
Bad Taste
Black Sheep
Jonestown
Waco
Once Were Warriors a New Zealand drama film
Das Boot
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Deer Hunter
the old school Japanese animations like Akira
Triplets of Belleville French animation Les Triplettes de Belleville
all those hongkong john woo Chow Yun-fat, Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee films
Way of the Dragon, Police Story etc
Horror Hits like Halloween
Bubba Ho-Tep
The new Asian scifi like S.Korea's 'The Host'
Korean I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK
JSA Joint Security Area
Documentary like Super Size Me
If you really want to go down the film maker rabbit hole you have this thing called ' Shorts ' very short films and very short movies, basically an idea or dialogue or plot condensed into 10 mins. I guess the final goal is for the film maker to advertise their ability and hopefully one day get work from a larger studio, the film shorts you will find a lot of them on vimeo, dailymotion and youtube. Some use CGI these days but its mostly old school techniquies and very indie, Arty film school stuff...They are not Hollywood, its back to pure writing, pure comedy, pure simple fantasy fiction and drama, pure film making before the days of Hollywood.
Totally indie & Their budgets are as low as you get.
Tom Hardy's Locke was an amazing film, I had massive respect for Hardy as an actor after watching that film. I dont really know anything like it
Korean film seems to be where its all at now if you can put up with reading subtitles.
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Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Indie?
These are the one's I've seen on your list. For the most part, they were all pretty good or even great:
Mad Max
Friday the 13th
Dolemite
Young Frankenstein
Killer Clowns from Outer Space
Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
Evil Dead
Black Sheep
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Halloween
Bubba Ho-Tep
Any others in your list you would particularly recommend?
Quote:
If you really want to go down the film maker rabbit hole you have this thing called ' Shorts ' very short films and very short movies, basically an idea or dialogue or plot condensed into 10 mins. I guess the final goal is for the film maker to advertise their ability and hopefully one day get work from a larger studio, the film shorts you will find a lot of them on vimeo, dailymotion and youtube. Some use CGI these days but its mostly old school techniquies and very indie, Arty film school stuff...They are not Hollywood, its back to pure writing, pure comedy, pure simple fantasy fiction and drama, pure film making before the days of Hollywood.
Totally indie & Their budgets are as low as you get.
I've not seen too many short flicks, but years back I caught a few on IFC. I can't find it now on YouTube, but my favorite was a black and white one from the early 2000s where a guy was going outside of his building for a smoke break. Along his long trek to the outside, he made small talk with people around the office and you saw all the no-smoking signs everywhere warning that smoking kills.
At the end of the flick, one of the guys he said hi to on his way out was actually a shooter, and the film ended with the only guy who survived being the guy who was forced outside to have a smoke.
Quote:
Tom Hardy's Locke was an amazing film, I had massive respect for Hardy as an actor after watching that film. I dont really know anything like it
Ah... So you're the other person that saw it.
I found it quite enthralling. It's a movie you can't really explain to anybody, because I'm sure any way I tried to sell it would make it sound stupid.
One of my favorite "genres" of movies is where they can make all or at least a majority of the film take place in a single location... the more claustrophobic the better.
Movies like Circle, Phone Booth, and Devil come to mind.
Locke was that, but it was also very much different than that. Only one man and his tech on the road. I've never seen Tom Hardy before, but I have to praise his acting chops for that flick. What a potentially horrible idea for a movie production if they had a bad actor and/or director doing it.
The film left me wanting for more when the credits started rolling, and I went from "wait... that's bullshit! You can't end it there!" to thinking about all of the possibilities of what happened to everybody after it was over.
That's my absolute favorite type of movie. The ones that I'm still thinking about days or even weeks after I've seen it.
Quote:
Korean film seems to be where its all at now if you can put up with reading subtitles.
I'm not a huge fan of that, but I might start being more relaxed about it. I don't know if my hearing is changing a bit or what. I don't have any problems IRL hearing what people are saying, but at least on the modern TVs I find that I have to turn the volume up quite a bit in any movie that has a lot of action just to hear the voices. When I visit my bro, my old man is always using subtitles when we watch something, and now that they're getting so easy to use in modern streaming services, I'm making use of it from time to time myself. When I watched Locke, I used it. Not that it was action heavy or his accent was too thick, but it was still an accent and I wanted to make sure I didn't miss any of his dialogue.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Any others in your list you would particularly recommend?
Really it Depends what you're into and sometimes me personally my mood or taste in film might vary depending on the day of the week or time of the year or whatever, sometimes I like thrillers, other times fantasy adventure or scifi
If you're into escapist animation, maybe checking out foreign stuff, make the Japanese Akira or French 'Les Triplettes de Belleville'
Horror? maybe check out the original Black and White movie Night of the Living Dead
Old Weird Classic Retro Scifi comedy then maybe 'Dark Star'
The net can help you sometimes. Websites like 'Taste of Cinema' List Genres such as 'Dystopia'
http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/20-great-dystopian-films-that-are-wo
rth-your-time/
another site called Taste Dive gives you films that are similar vibe or Movies like the one you just seen
https://tastedive.com/movies/like/Killer-Klowns-From-Outer-Space
There is also a Movie Map site which links movies that are like each other but I'm not sure I always agree with the websites picks
https://www.movie-map.com/the+evil+dead
Biblr another site
https://bilbr.com/movies-like-mad-max/
and Movie Flavor
https://www.movieflavor.com/similar/The+Great+Outdoors/1988
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I've found recently that I have a REAL hard time actually sitting down to watch a movie, and an even harder time getting into a TV show. If it's a TV show that has had a multiple season run already it gets harder for me to want to watch it the more seasons it has, but at the same time if it's a new show I usually don't want to get into it because it's probably going to be cancelled before it wraps up.
I can literally sit and watch YouTube for hours when I'm winding down for the day though. I think it's because YouTube spent the last decade and a half tweaking and reaching near-perfection with it's presentation and the behind the scenes algorithms (all political bias aside).
There's just a sense of a lot more control there, and if you feel like watching a 2 hour video by a content creator you like you can, but most of the time it's 10 or 15 minute videos that you can always click off of if they're not doing it for you. The "next up" is usually a good choice considering the video you were just watching and the sidebar/homepage has a lot of good choices based off of your prior viewing habits.
To watch a movie, I've got to fire up my TV which rarely ever even gets turned on, load up the Fire Stick, and then mindlessly surf all of the options out there until I find something that maybe I might be interested enough in investing 90 minutes or more of my time... all based off of the cover image of the DVD, a one paragraph blurb, and an almost meaningless 5 star rating system.
That's why I like recommendations from other people. I get most of mine from youtube channels these days, if I'm not getting them from my old man. My friends mostly are into Hollywood schlock that I have no interest in, and my brothers have totally different tastes than I do.
I'd be interested in some of your "must watch" list though, knowing how much you liked Locke.
Thanks for the tips on those websites. I'll check them out.
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Finally got access to City of Lost Children. I'm going to check that one out when I can find the time to unwind.
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I watched City of Lost Children last night. Thanks for the recommendation JSF. That was right up my ally.
I was thinking it was a mix of Ink, Brazil and Dark City. Ink, which I've mentioned here several times before as perhaps my favorite movie, came out quite a bit after the fact, but had to have been HUGELY influenced by this movie.
Is there a dubbed version? I happened to watch the subtitled version. It was annoying at first, but once I got into the movie it didn't bother me much. It was probably less bothersome than some bad dub job would have been.
Beautiful sets and cinematography.
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Delicatessen in 1991 could be another for you, French Horror Comedy scifi-ish? Dominique Pinon again as an actor, Director Jean-Pierre again. Maybe surrealist but more thriller and great camera work and sound, visually stimulating film, just a unique movie from beginning to end. He also did the weird Rom-Com Amélie and the 4th Alien movie, one of Joss Whedon's first feature film scripts. If you like his stuff you might enjoy that whole french new wave-surrealist quirky film they have been doing since the 70s, 80s and 1990s, I think maybe Cronenberg, Terry Gilliam, Chan-wook Park, Sam Raimi or David Lynch or Kubrick were maybe inspired by French films even if they did not admit it.
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It's funny you mention Delicatessin and Amelie. I saw both of them mentioned when I did some reading on CoLT after I watched it. I can't imagine I'd have any interest in Amelie, but Delicatessen kind of piqued my interest. (Despite what I consider a terrible name that would have immediately turned me off had I not bumped into it the way that I did).
You just mentioned a whole list of directors that I do enjoy. It wouldn't surprise me if they were influenced by French surrealism flicks if CoLT is anything to go by.
You ever see Run Lola Run? My brother just raved about it today when I was telling him about CoLT. I think I'm going to give that a watch next.
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Quote:Keep in mind this cinematography is from almost 30 years ago. I think that was also pre-CGI.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I watched City of Lost Children last night. Thanks for the recommendation JSF. That was right up my ally.
I was thinking it was a mix of Ink, Brazil and Dark City. Ink, which I've mentioned here several times before as perhaps my favorite movie, came out quite a bit after the fact, but had to have been HUGELY influenced by this movie.
Is there a dubbed version? I happened to watch the subtitled version. It was annoying at first, but once I got into the movie it didn't bother me much. It was probably less bothersome than some bad dub job would have been.
Beautiful sets and cinematography.
I think I saw a version once which had dubbed ST. I am not sure which version I have now.
I think the subtitles is how I saw it in cinema. Back then, that level of cinematography was only available on the big screen.
That level of cinematography I think is most closely matched lately in Jane Got A Gun (or maybe it was Hateful Eight), Wind River,
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It was 95, which was two years after Jurassic Park came out.
There was some CGI, but like most things that didn't cost a bajillion bucks and have Spielberg or Lucas attached it wasn't particularly good. Probably on-par with the "dust" effect on the Buffy TV show. Thankfully it was minimal and if you didn't allow it to take you out of the movie than it doesn't.
I'm referring to the sequences with the mind-control flea and the green mist that contained the nightmare which floated around the port town and ultimately through Miette's nose.
I'm not going to fault the movie for that. I can't imagine that there were really any other good options to get that point across with the budget they had at a time when big budget studios were using million dollar computers less powerful than a standard smart phone today to make Dinosaurs come to life.
I'm betting the dub job isn't very good, which would be a shame. It's probably better that I watched the subtitled version.
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