X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes (1963)

Top Roger Corman sci-fi about a scientist who doesn’t think the human eye is good enough. No, Ray Milland wants to see more colors and shapes and Pokemon and whatever, so he comes up with a special B-movie Visine that you just drop directly onto your eyeballs and then you can see through everyone’s clothes. Take more of it and you can see through people’s skin to their internal organs. Take a little more and things get really crazy (and Milland starts to lose his mind). The bare bones of this film is just a mad scientist story. In the 1940s, Boris Karloff or George Zucco might have played the part. This was the 60s, though. The Twilight Zone was on TV and several great 1950s films upped the game for science-fiction in the movies. And this film keeps up. It’s weird and clever. It’s also psychedelic before the word was commonly used. Ray Milland may as well be on LSD for his bizarre visions as he sees straight into the center of the universe. Best performance: Don Rickles as the glowering opportunist who turns the disgraced Milland into a sideshow act.