The Forgotten David Bowie Sci-Fi Flick You Can Catch On Amazon

Beloved weirdo David Bowie was weird. It's part of what so many people loved about him. As a result of that weirdness and the enthusiasm that surrounded it, Bowie got to make movies that occasionally felt like the technicolor nightmares of a raver who forgot to drink water before bed.

Which brings us to "The Man Who Fell To Earth," the 1976 science fiction drama directed by the same guy who did the Anjelica Huston version of "The Witches" from 1990 that you still haven't fully recovered from watching. The cult classic film asks a familiar question: What if an alien showed up and tried to take some of our water, but got distracted by booze and ladies and the lifestyle which one might expect to experience during the '70s if they looked enough like David Bowie?

The answer: arthouse heartbreak, a few iconic shots, and an overwhelming sense of confused despair. While sci-fi audiences would return to the world of serialized 1940s space operas the following year with the release of the first entry in the "Star Wars" franchise, "The Man Who Fell To Earth" instead focused on a quieter story about the corrupting influence of modern culture. Imagine "E.T." meets "Leaving Las Vegas." It's sort of like that, but Rip Torn shows up with no pants for a minute. The whole thing is Cocoa Puffs.

Unsurprisingly, nobody was really sure what to do with "The Man Who Fell To Earth" when it first came out — the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry even claims that the film's financial backers rejected the movie in its finished state, claiming that it wasn't the project they thought they'd financed.

Critics were divided, too. Roger Ebert gave "The Man Who Fell To Earth" two and a half stars, calling it "a film so preposterous and posturing, so filled with gaps of logic and continuity, that if it weren't so solemn there'd be the temptation to laugh aloud." Nevertheless, like just about anything with David Bowie's face on the poster, the picture found a devoted audience, and contemporary critics seem more inclined to think of it, at worst, as the kind of inaccessible art that smart people enjoy, like modern art or expensive wine with undertones that you can only taste while you're wearing a turtleneck.

"The Man Who Fell To Earth" is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime. You can also spend four dollars and rent a copy of "Labyrinth," which is equally dizzying, but with fewer emotional stakes and a dwarf that gleefully kills fairies with insecticide. Totally up to you.