The Final Programme (1973)

Mick Jagger was offered the lead and turned it down for being too weird.

Michael Moorcock is one of the most prolific fantasy writers who ever lived. In more than half a century, his vast body of work has been turned into a feature film only once.

THE FINAL PROGRAMME (1973) gave his coolest creation, Jerry Cornelius, a Nobel-winning physicist, rock star, assassin, and impeccable dandy to Robert Fuest, the stylist behind the campy Vincent Price Dr. Phibes films. Fuest had started as a set designer, and it shows. The film is a dazzling pop-art fever dream more interested in looks than sense.

The Final Programme is about a race to build the perfect self-sufficient immortal human as civilization collapses. Jenny Runacre steals it as Miss Brunner, a scientist who absorbs her lovers whole.

Critics savaged it, audiences ignored it, Moorcock disowned it, and yet, decades on, it survives as a cult object, beloved by people who treasure just this kind of magnificent, swaggering failure.