Sometimes, you just need an escape from the relentlessness of the Thanksgiving celebrations, and Hollywood has been there for you — at least, some years. Certainly, in recent years, there have always been a couple of oddball films coming out for T-Day — but in previous years, it was hit and miss. Here's the complete list of Thanksgiving counterprogramming of the past 25 years, including some stuff that's not science fiction but is in some sense genre film.

All movie titles link to IMDB or Box Office Mojo pages containing release dates:

1984

Supergirl A movie guaranteed to make you give thanks that you're never going to see it again — and a strong contender for the worst superhero film of all time. What I want to know is, what sort of guy sees his buddy blown thirty feet across the parking lot, and then decides to try and attack Supergirl using a switchblade?

1985

Rocky IV The good news is, it would inspire you to go get in shape after eating all that turkey and stuffing, thanks to one of the most classic training montages ever:

1986

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home The most fun of the original cast movies, this probably would have been a good one to escape to with your family. Although the famous "Shatner underwater" scene might have proved distressing.

Solarbabies I'm convinced there's something very broken about this post-apocalyptic rollerblading film, but at least on the surface it looks very wholesome. Except for the part where the woman with the huge shoulderpads says, "Lock it down and disembowel it."

1988

Cocoon: The Return I'm not sure anybody should have to deal with Steve Gutenberg on a full stomach.

1989

Back to the Future 2 Given that Marty McFly's mom gets bizarre breast implants and becomes Biff Tannen's bitch, this is definitely a good film for a family outing.

1990

Predator 2 The underrated cop drama/Predator attack movie starring Danny Glover... it's really not as bad as you remember.

Robot Jox This, on the other hand... giant mecha gladiators, fighting it out with chainsaw crotches and other armaments... this is what family is all about.

1992

The Crying Game Terrorists, thugs, and the great transgender panic of 1992. I bet you took your mom to see this one.

1994

Junior Pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger, watching sentimental movies and crying a lot, will help you understand your own family. Really.

1995

Casino It's an underrated Scorsese classic, full of brutality and weirdness. Perfect Thanksgiving fare.

Nick of Time I may be the only person who saw this movie in the theater. Johnny Depp has 90 minutes to kill someone or other, or else Christopher Walken will kill someone or other. Mostly worth it to watch Depp and Walken overacting in a shopping mall. And for Walken saying, "I'll make you a sauce for that black Irish cocksucker's meat." I'm happy this and the Scorsese film were the main choices for Thanksgiving 1995.

1997

Alien Resurrection The whole time you're with your family, you can imagine you're actually hanging out with lesbian android Winona. Or you can just daydream about what this movie could have been if they'd filmed Joss Whedon's screenplay.

1998

Very Bad Things A sex worker gets killed at a bachelor party — and then things turn ugly. Probably just like your family gatherings. It does star Jon "Iron Man" Favreau, and it's directed by Peter "Hancock" Berg.

1999

End of Days Satan and Thanksgiving — and Arnie! They fit together perfectly! Satan is looking for his Bride... so it's about family and relationships and stuff.

2000

Unbreakable A horrific act of mass murder brings to light a guy who can find the rapists and creeps in our midst. It's light family entertainment — but it does deal with some real questions about the power of story. So yeah, probably a good one to get out of the house for.

Quills This, on the other hand — the Marquis De Sade! In full effect! I'm betting many of you dragged your entire family to see this.

2001

Black Knight Martin Lawrence gets zapped back to the Middle Ages, and presumably, goes medieval on their asses. Enough to make your entire family commit mass suicide, Heavens Gate-style.

The Devil's Backbone An early Guillermo Del Toro classic, and more proof that horror owns Thanksgiving. Your family doesn't deserve this movie.

2002

Solaris You could watch Steven Soderbergh's trippy-ass remake of Tarkovsky's classic while you're already wigged out on tryptophan. Why not?

Wes Craven Presents: They Or you could have seen this gem — they're coming for you!

2003

Timeline "Your father is in the 14th. century." Hey, maybe he can hang out with Martin Lawrence there!

2006

The Fountain And speaking of trippy movies when you're already stoned on tryptophan... at least your entire family will each have different opinions about what happened in this film.

Tenacious D in: The Pick of Destiny Jack Black! Rocking out! It's bound to make more sense than The Fountain.

2007

Hitman A video game adaptation about a guy who kills people and thwarts some vague conspiracy thing. Probably the purest example of counterprogramming ever.

The Mist Given the shocking, ultra-secret ending, this is an... interesting choice for a family occasion. If you don't want to be spoiled, don't watch this clip:

2008

Transporter 3 It's a threequel starring Jason Statham. How can it be bad?

Twilight You probably have at least one family member who's as creepy as Edward. So it's good to get some perspective.

2009

The Road And then we're up to this year's crop... this whole movie is as depressing as The Mist's ending. But at least it does have a genuinely pro-family message.

Ninja Assassin This is the film we'll probably actually be watching on T-day. Ninjas! Wachowskis! James McTeigue! Out-and-out mayhem!

Additional reporting by Mary Ratliff.

There's a pervasive urban legend online that William Gibson went to see Blade Runner when he was working on his seminal Japanophile cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. And Gibson ran out of the theater a few minutes into the movie (or in some versions, just walked out) because he was so shocked by the similarites between that movie's vision of the future and the one depicted in his novel. (In some versions, Gibson is scared that Ridley Scott and co. are actually in his head.)

Gibson is quoted as saying:

Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk. The Japanese themselves knew it and delighted in it. I remember my first glimpse of Shibuya, when one of the young Tokyo journalists who had taken me there, his face drenched with the light of a thousand media-suns - all that towering, animated crawl of commercial information - said, ‘You see? You see? It is Blade Runner town.' And it was. It so evidently was.

Back in the early 1980s, Japan's ascendance seemed assured — there were a host of business books claiming that Japan had lost World War II, but won the peace through superior economic policies. Books like The Enigma Of Japanese Power by Karel Van Wolferen became unlikely bestsellers. Meanwhile, Japanese politicians like Ishihara Shintaro started flexing their muscles — Ishihara made waves with a book called No To Ieru Nihon, or The Japan That Can Say No (to the United States.)

But also, Japanese technology was clearly better, and Japanese pop culture looked cool. In the early 1980s, U.S. television started being flooded with anime programs like Robotech and Star Blazers0, and U.S. comics fans started discovering Manga. But the one-two punch of Blade Runner and Neuromancer was what settled it: for the next decade or so, Japan was how we viewed the future.

And given that the 1980s was a very neon-happy time in general, and the U.S. viewed Japanese cities as being splashy and full of neon lights, it made sense that Japanese influences crept into everything. Total Recall, for example, features Arnold Schwarzenegger running around a neon-drenched future cityscape, especially once he goes to Mars. It's not specifically Japanese, but it feels Japan-influenced.

In Back To The Future 2, Future Biff works for a mysterious Japanese businessman known as Mr. Fujitsu, and it's hinted that by 2015, Japan dominates the world's economy. (The film-makers pretty much come out and say this on the DVD commentary.)

In the Max Headroom TV series, the world is dominated by the ZikZak Corporation, which despite its non-Japanese-sounding name, is actually a Japanese company. And the dystopian cityscape (around a minute in) looks very Blade Runner inspired:

In the early 1990s, Marvel launched its futuristic "2099" titles, with Rampage 2099 and Spider-Man 2099 among others. And one of the things that was futuristic and different about the world of 2099 was the fact that Tony Stark's company, Stark Industries, had turned Japanese, and was now known as Stark-Fujikawa.

And the U.S. got its own home-grown anime program with 1991's Aeon Flux, airing on MTV:


Around that same time, we started to see a lot more Asian influences in animation, including shows like Batman: The Animated Series.

To some extent, any movie with "virtual reality" or "cyberpunk" influences kept bringing back a Japanophile vibe, like 1995's Virtuosity, which had one of its crucial scenes between Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe's virtual killer take place in a sushi bar:

And the politically correct, scrubbed San Angeles of 1995's Demolition Man was a blend of L.A. and Tokyo, in both its buildings and its fashions:

Famously, the cyberpunk trainwreck Johnny Mnemonic featured a whole slew of scenes and subplots that took place in Japan, revolving around the character of Mr. Takahashi, played by popular actor Takeshi Kitano. These scenes are still only available on the Japanese DVD:

Sadly, Japan's economic hegemony ran out of juice in the early 1990s, when their real-estate bubble burst (sound familiar?) and the country spent an entire "lost decade" mired in stagnation. The vision of Japan as future economic uberpower was replaced by a creeping irrelevance — but Japanese pop culture remained as influential as ever, maybe even more than during the powerhouse days.

And because nothing in science fiction ever really goes away, there are still plenty of examples of Japanophile influences in recent SF. Take Steven Spielberg's A.I., whose future city looks a lot like Tokyo. (Skip to 4:45 in this video):

The shiny metropolis of Coruscant has a very Neo Tokyo vibe, in Star Wars: Attack Of The Clones (go to around 2:40 in this video):

When we visit a future Batman, who's trained by an aging Bruce Wayne to wear a Bat-exoskeleton, in Batman Beyond, the future Gotham is covered with Japanese kanji:

Joss Whedon made waves with his show Firefly and the sequel movie Serenity, which take place in a sort of vaguely pan-Asian future where everybody peppers his/her speech with a kind of pidgin Chinese. (Although there are no actual Asian people around.) And this Fruity Oaty Bars commercial has a pronounced anime vibe:

And of course, Aeon Flux got its own live-action movie a few years ago:

Top image: Amazing Neon vista from Osaka, by PFC on Flickr.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

A major problem with this version of 2015, of course, is that the technology is too unrealistic for just 30 years ahead. Besides the flying skateboard, there are hand-controlled doorways, self-fitting clothing and weather control, notes cranky blogger Kevin D. Hendricks. It's a common failing in media science fiction: depicting Mars colonies and levitation in the near future.

But BTTF2's real sin is lack of daring. The first two BTTF movies are all about culture shock, within one generation either way. In the first movie, Marty travels back to the 1950s. And it's so foreign he practically dies of culture shock. Not just the primitive technology, but the bizarre courtship rituals and general lack of guitar-shredding and skatepunking. So when BTTF 2 goes one generation in the opposite direction, it ought to deliver the same level of shock.

Instead, he spends a lot of time in a 1980s-themed cafe, and all the kids' fashions seem to be based on 80s nostalgia. All of the new technology has product-placement logos like "Mattel" and "Nike" prominently displayed. It's like the Jetsons, where 1960s cliches become futuristic just because you add "space" to them, like "space-napalm" or whatever. Another way the movie signals its futuristic-ness is to have fax machines everywhere, says Hendricks. Because, you know, fax machines are teh future.

If Marty McFly actually came forward in time and visited 2008, let alone 2015, his skatepunk ass would be freaked. The Internet, with its wealth of bizarre porn, would be the flipside of the 1950s and its uptight obsession with "going steady." Rampaging hustlers, furries and leather daddies on every street corner... well, maybe that's just my neighborhood. Not to mention our catastrophic climate change and terrorism obsession. BTTF2's future shock doesn't go far enough. [monkeyouttanowhere]