At the time of writing, for example, the first two films in the sci-fi genre on Prime Video are Interstellar and Inception – logical choices, you could say, since they’re among the more better-known and acclaimed genre films of the past eight years. Not far behind, we find Arrival – Denis Villenueve’s critically lauded and very moving alien visitation drama – and after that, In Time, Andrew Niccol’s post-financial crisis thriller starring Justin Timberlake. Nestled in amongst Sink Hole, Princess Of Mars (Asylum’s low-budget John Carter and Avatar cash-in), we found an hour-long documentary, UFOs Reconsidered. A bit further on, and we discovered something called Ancient Aliens – Archons – Extraterrestrial Invaders, a documentary exploring “the facts” behind an invasion in Ancient Egypt. Later comes UFOs: The Best Evidence Ever Caught On Tape 2. A few dozen titles in, we stumbled on Robo Vampire 3: Counter Destroy – a film that has RoboCop firing a machine gun on the cover, but is actually a Hong Kong martial arts horror comedy with some truly horrific dubbing. RoboCop clearly didn’t make the final cut. Admittedly, you could find some of these cult films through the search function, but unless you know they’re listed on Prime, you’d struggle to find them while simply browsing through the dozens of similar-looking titles cluttering up the listings. Roger Corman’s wonderful X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes, for example, is placed somewhere near Healing Codes For The Biological Apocalypse on our list. This isn’t to say, of course, that other streaming services don’t have their own fair share of weird, wonderful and often quite bad titles – Netflix has plenty of them as you scroll through the listings. What’s strange about Prime, though, is how many of these pseudo-scientific documentaries and other, somewhat homemade-looking bits and pieces are, and how pervasively they get into each genre as you’re hunting through them. In the thriller section, we were offered things like Bible Conspiracies, The Truth About Aliens, and Mysteries Of Angels And Demons. The experience is less like rooting through an old-fashioned video store – a quite enjoyable pastime in years gone by – and more like being an archaeologist in a HP Lovecraft story: the deeper you dig, the more bizarre and unrecognizable the discoveries become.
