Hidden Gem Sci-Fi Movies on Amazon Freevee

Amazon Freevee is packed to the gills with free-to-watch movies and TV shows, and the streaming app now boasts a few original productions of its own, but when there’s so much choice at your fingertips, how do you decide what’s worth your precious eyeball time?

If you’re on the lookout for a hidden sci-fi gem to check out, we’ve got you! This list sorts the science fiction wheat from the science fiction chaff, and we’ll be updating it regularly to make sure all the best options are still available, while adding any new gems that appear on the streaming service in the future.

Daybreakers

Daybreakers is one of the most overlooked vampire movies of the modern era, but its sci-fi elements really do shine and its clinical vibes are not what you’d expect from your average bloodsucker tale. It’s inventive, entertaining, and definitely worth a look.

Directed by Michael and Peter Spierig (Jigsaw), the movie is set in a future where the world is almost completely populated and controlled by vampires. Vampire scientist Edward Dalton (scream king Ethan Hawke) is researching a human blood substitute, but he and his colleague work for a huge corporation called Bromley Marks that supplies human blood to an endlessly thirsty population. Meanwhile, a former vampire (Willem Dafoe) thinks he has a cure that can turn all the vampires back into humans again – something that Bromley Marks wants to avoid at all costs.

Available on US service

From Beyond

In From Beyond, scientists are fascinated with performing experiments on pineal glands using a complex device called the Resonator, hoping they’ll make a breakthrough that will change the fundamentals of human psychology. Little do they know that their scientific strides will instead lead to them being able to perceive beings from another dimension; beings who will seize the opportunity to transform them into monsters.

Before the Full Moon universe got underway, Charles Band’s previous company Empire was making fun horror and sci-fi movies fast and cheap back in the 1980s, and sci-fi horror From Beyond is in the top tier of the erstwhile company’s output. Loosely based on H. P. Lovecraft’s short story of the same name, the film comes from late Re-Animator director Stuart Gordon, with largely the same cast as that genre classic, including Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton – but the actors’ roles are reversed here, with Combs the good guy and Crampton more antagonistic.

Available on UK service

Battle Royale

If you’ve never seen Kinji Fukasaku’s brutal and controversial 2000 sci-fi thriller Battle Royale, now’s your chance, free of charge!

After a major recession and in the midst of a crushingly high unemployment rate, the Japanese government has decided to pass the Battle Royale Act, which it is hoped will deal with the country’s troublesome youngsters. The film zeroes in on the latest batch of delinquents, who are pitted against each other in a battle to the death where only one of them can survive and be declared a good citizen. In many ways, Battle Royale was the original Squid Game, and the scenes of carnage in this movie dystopia are just as bloody and upsetting. Not for those of a sensitive nature!

Available on US service

Right at Your Door

Just on the very edge of sci-fi is the 2006 indie thriller Right at Your Door, starring Mary McCormack and Rory Cochrane. When dirty bombs hit LA, unemployed musician Brad seals himself in his house so he isn’t exposed to the toxic fallout, but when his wife Lexi finally makes her way home from work, he is told by authorities that she is infected, and he refuses to let her inside. The tense dialogue between Brad and Lexi as they wait for news on the circumstances of the attack, and how long Lexi has left to live, is incredible stuff. Right at Your Door understands that the unstable relationship between Brad and Lexi is the perfect breeding ground for resentment and horror in this setting. Come for the anxiety, stay for the twists!

Available on UK service

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension

A cult sci-fi gem that will always be picking up new fans, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension has a protagonist to match its complex plot in Buckaroo (Peter Weller) who isn’t just a physicist, but a neurosurgeon, a test pilot, AND a rock star! He has to use all his skills to save the world in this movie by defeating a band of inter-dimensional aliens.

This mad 1984 caper also features the likes of Jeff Goldblum and John Lithgow, and although it was a flop on its release, the film does have a dedicated following and has spawned plenty of video games and comics in the decades since its debut. Most notably in recent years, Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One featured its main character Parzival dressing up in a Buckaroo Banzai costume for a date. Amazon Freevee offers you a chance to find out if you’ve been missing out on this sci-fi curio or not!

Available on UK service

The Lawnmower Man

This one hasn’t aged particularly well and it was even a little problematic at the time of its original release, but it’s always fascinating to check out the old school Stephen King adaptations, and The Lawnmower Man still certainly delivers an entertaining chunk of old school sci-fi horror. It’s fun to see how far we’ve come in the realms of virtual reality and computing in the decades since it debuted!

The flick stars Jeff Fahey as Jobe Smith, who is an intellectually disabled gardener experimented on by Dr. Lawrence “Larry” Angelo (Pierce Brosnan). Larry thinks that by using new technologies he can increase Jobe’s intelligence, but he accidently dials everything up to eleven when Jobe acquires superhuman abilities that turn him aggressive, and Jobe becomes obsessed with turning into a higher being, one who can rule us all on a digital plane of existence.

Available on US service

Time Trap

2017’s Time Trap is a truly overlooked sci-fi film that has luckily found an audience on streaming since it first came out, and we’re here to give it an enthusiastic thumbs up, too. The movie involves a group of students in Texas looking for their missing professor, who has gone missing in mysterious circumstances. While searching for him, they discover a mysterious cave that they decide to explore, unaware that said cave is subject to strange events and time-space distortion. While the subject matter is quite complicated and the many twists even more so, Time Trap clips along as a brisk pace and dishes up a solid 95-minute slice of sci-fi fun!

Available on UK service

Fire in the Sky

Fire in the Sky is a sci-fi mystery movie with a difference, as it’s a biopic based on Travis Walton’s book The Walton Experience, about his extra terrestrial abduction! When logger Walton disappears after encountering an unidentified flying object, his friends are soon blamed for his being missing. It’s not until Walton turns up later near a gas station, naked and confused, that the blame lifts, but it’s still some time before he remembers where he was during his missing days. He believes he was experimented on by alien beings, but will anyone lend credence to his tale?

The movie is a who’s who of recognizable character actors, from James Garner to Robert Patrick, and is still an interesting watch, even in our post X-Files era of doubt.

Available on UK service

The Wraith

The Wraith has been labeled under many genres – supernatural, action, adventure, fantasy – but Amazon Freevee understands that it’s as much a sci-fi movie as it is all of those! The film focuses on a popular high-school lad played by a young Charlie Sheen, who comes back from the dead to finally get revenge on the evil drag racer responsible for his demise. But this is no ordinary ghost or zombie, The Wraith is a hi-tech apparition covered in black leather and an all-black Dodge M4S Turbo Interceptor supercar! The movie has kick-ass car chases and a primo 80s soundtrack, so if you’re in the mood for a little trashy sci-fi with some inexplicable lore, this could be the gem for you.

Available on US and UK services

Primer

But if you’re in the mood for something way more cerebral, Amazon Freevee has you covered with this complex indie movie from 2004. Primer follows two engineers, Aaron (the now-canceled Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan), as they blow off steam away from their dull day jobs by accidentally inventing time travel in Aaron’s garage. How exactly they’ve managed it becomes a tapestry that you’ll want to unpick, even as it becomes clear that one or both of them cannot be trusted with the groundbreaking knowledge they’ve uncovered, nor the ramifications that foresight inevitably will have on both their families and relationship.

Available on UK service

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Not all remakes are bad! While Invasion of the Bodysnatchers is based on the 1955 novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney, and had already been adapted into a 1956 film, this 70s version joins The Thing as one of the great cinematic reimaginings of our time.

Starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum, and Leonard Nimoy, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers is a 10/10 sci-fi classic that explores post-60s counterculture fallout through the lens of a strange alien invasion, when a race of gelatinous creatures travel to Earth from their expiring homeworld, take the form of plant pods with pink flowers, and slowly set about replacing humans with duplicates. As Matthew Bennell (Sutherland) aims to stop the takeover of our planet, there are horrifying consequences of the invasion afoot.

Available on UK service

Stalker

Sci-fi classic Stalker should be right up your street if you’re after something from the world of cinema past. Made in 1979, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Soviet art film is based on the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and they were in charge of turning it into a screenplay here. In the film, the “Stalker” of the title (Alexander Kaidanovsky) has to take a hazardous journey with his two clients. Their destination is a mysterious area known as the “Zone”, where they will supposedly find a room which will grant them their innermost desires. At 161 minutes long, you’ll definitely need time on your hands to finish Stalker, but it’s considered a classic for a reason!

Available on US service

Kill Switch

In what’s sure to be a divisive addition to this list, sci-fi actioner Kill Switch will appeal to you if you’re looking for something different! The film is for sure a hot mess, but it at least tries to do something interesting with the genre, even if that “something different” is using futuristic flashbacks in the style of a fps video game.

Dan Stevens stars as Will Porter, a former pilot and current physicist in the near future who is recruited by a shady power company called Alterplex to save not one, but TWO worlds that are on the verge of extinction thanks to Alterplex’s quantum energy tower. Porter must battle his way to the tower and decide which version of the universe to save before time runs out. Worth a look, even if you decide it’s too messy for a redemption arc.

Available on UK service

Lifeforce

British sci-fi clanger Lifeforce was directed by the guy who did Poltergeist and written by the guy who penned Alien so surely it should have been a smash hit! Unfortunately, it was a bit of a cowboy operation behind the scenes and turned out to be a flop, but what we got in the end was a really weird science fiction movie that took the concept of space vampires and ran with it, all the way to the end of the line.

With a consistently full-frontal Mathilda May as the movie’s lead space vampire, Lifeforce tells the story of a trio of creatures who are found in suspended animation in a ship attached to the tail of a comet, and who are brought to Earth by the crew of a European Space Shuttle so that their race can be evaluated and perhaps preserved. Things go from bad to worse from thereon out!

Available on UK service

Communion

Another alien abduction sci-fi gem to check out if you’re feeling hungry for more extra terrestrial tales after Fire in the Sky is the cult, Christopher Walken-led Communion, about a father who has some odd encounters and has to reckon with the idea that his family somehow have a connection to beings beyond the stars. The film takes great steps to be a character piece rather than be laden with special effects, and that’s due to the involvement of New York based author Whitley Strieber, who wrote the book that Communion is based on, and who believes the experiences detailed within it happened to him in real life.

Available on UK and US services