Maybe it's Valentine's Day, and you're looking to get into the spirit of the occasion. Or maybe it's date night, and you're looking to take things further with someone new, or to keep that romantic spark going strong with a longtime love.

Regardless, you probably have the same problem that we do. So many of us have seen so many of the same familiar favorites, from modern popcorn crowd-pleasers like "Love Actually," "When Harry Met Sally," and "Say Anything" to cinema classics like "West Side Story," "Casablanca" and "It Happened One Night," so many times that it can be hard to find a romantic movie that's fresh and sets the right mood.

So, rather than waste your time with selections anyone could crib off a "Best of…" list from IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, the American Film Institute, or countless other movie websites, we're going off the beaten path. These romantic films feature more unorthodox depictions of love affairs, making them a surprising treat for Valentine's Day or any other day of the year.

Krull

Imagine you're back in the 1980s, after they've stopped making "Star Wars" films. It'll be close to two decades before Peter Jackson will helm the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, but you kind of want something in between, an epic sci-fi fantasy with swords, monsters, magic, and comely princesses in need of rescuing.

This is basically the target market that "Krull" was hoping to hit in 1983. However, what earns the film a place on this list is that the Beast — a Cronenbergian alien who has invaded the planet Krull and stolen Lyssa (Lysette Anthony, at the peak of her hotness) from Prince Colwyn (a suitably forthright Ken Marshall) — can't win unless he's sundered the young couple's love. The Beast recreates Colwyn's handsome likeness for Lyssa and sends women to seduce Colwyn, but both attempts fail because the couple's love for one another is too pure and strong.

In addition, a fascinating subplot involves the wizard Ynyr (Freddie Jones) reconciling with his former lover, the Widow of the Web (Francesca Annis, his costar in David Lynch's "Dune"). In the process, we see that the older sages are so committed to reuniting Colwyn and Lyssa because their own love had turned so sour.

Finally, look for early screen performances by Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane, both playing heroic bandits, and the on-point stop-motion animation of the giant Crystal Spider.

Romancing The Stone

Before Michael Douglas made "Fatal Attraction" in 1987, thereby pioneering the "Michael Douglas has sex with the wrong woman" subgenre of suspense thrillers, he was a credible contender for the sort of ruggedly robust man-of-action roles that his equally square-jawed, dimple-chinned father, Kirk Douglas, filled out so naturally.

In 1984's "Romancing the Stone," Douglas does his best Indiana Jones impression as Jack Colton, a roguish smuggler who crosses the path of big-city romance novelist Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) when she gets stranded in Colombia. Joan finds herself living out an adventure straight out of one of her own novels, in the company of a man who bears a striking resemblance to her leading men. The joke, of course, is that the same rakish traits that Joan finds so appealing in her fictional fantasy hunks are infuriating when she has to deal with them in real life.

Add Danny DeVito as Jack's unrepentantly sleazy rival, and you have the birth of the Douglas-Turner-DeVito comedy trio, which would carry on through 1985's underrated "The Jewel of the Nile" (love that Billy Ocean!) and 1989's pitch-black anti-romantic comedy "The War of the Roses."

Better Off Dead

Writer-director "Savage" Steve Holland is one of the few folks who could credibly transform the tale of a teen wanting to kill himself after his girlfriend breaks up with him into a cartoonish comedy. Holland wasn't just parodying the clichés of teen-targeted '80s rom-coms in 1985's "Better Off Dead," when he was only halfway through the decade. He was also inventing brand-new clichés that subsequent films would employ to far lesser effect.

That being said, it really helps that he cast the perpetually mopey-faced John Cusack as his hapless lead character. During the nonstop succession of blink-and-you'll-miss-it sight gags and endlessly quotable running jokes ("I want my two dollars!"), Cusack's character learns to put his breakup into its proper perspective, and even finds new love waiting for him.

After all, the reason why Holland can get away with lampooning his lead character's emotional extremes is because few events in the lives of suburban white kids are as big a deal as they'd like to believe.

Some Kind Of Wonderful

Even as the '80s-era oeuvre of John Hughes has enjoyed a much-deserved resurgence, this 1987 romantic drama remains stubbornly overlooked in favor of comedies such as 1984's "Sixteen Candles" and 1986's "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

On its face, "Some Kind of Wonderful" is a more serious, gender-reversed version of 1986's "Pretty in Pink" in which a less-entitled Duckie gets picked instead. Working-class average guy Eric Stoltz pursues high school classmate and queen bee Lea Thompson until he realizes that his tomboyish best friend and fellow outsider, played by Mary Stuart Masterson, is the one he's truly loved all along.

Unlike some of Hughes' other teen films, which haven't aged as well, "Some Kind of Wonderful" treats both of the female leads in its love triangle with respect and affection, with Thompson's social butterfly eventually empathizing with school misfits like Stoltz and Masterson (after the latter is subjected to bullying rumors of being a lesbian).

Blind Date

In "Blind Date," Bruce Willis (making his first credited film appearance) co-stars with a young Kim Basinger in a Blake Edwards-directed screwball farce. Here, Willis plays Walter, an overworked yuppie whose frantic efforts go unappreciated by the impersonal company he works for, and who dreams of becoming a rhythm-and-blues musician (a dream shared in real life by Willis, who also released "The Return of Bruno" studio album and a one-hour HBO comedy special in 1987).

Walter's mild-mannered existence is turned upside down when his brother Ted (the sadly departed Phil Hartman) arranges a date with Nadia (the aforementioned Basinger), while warning him that, if Nadia gets drunk, "she loses control."

This proves to have far less sexy connotations than Walter anticipated, and any queasiness modern audiences might feel about questions of consent are soon sidestepped. Nadia manages to get Walter fired from his job and his car destroyed, all while they're being stalked by her jealous ex-boyfriend (John Larroquette). In the end, though, a little destruction turns out to be what Walter's life probably needed.

Earth Girls Are Easy

On the zanier side of comedies about how kooky Southern California was in the '80s is "Earth Girls Are Easy," in which Geena Davis plays a Valley girl (her character is even named "Valerie Gail") who's already coping with a cheating fink of a fiancé (Charles Rocket, another "SNL" star who left us too soon) when a UFO crash-lands in her swimming pool. The spaceship is piloted by three aliens covered in neon-hued fur, but when Davis' fellow hairstylist Julie Brown (who co-wrote the script) gives them a trim, they turn out to be three buff dudes.

In 1988, two years before they were reunited on screen in FOX's "In Living Color," Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey costarred as two-thirds of this horny alien trio, with their leader played by a surprisingly suave and dashing Jeff Goldblum.

The '80s subgenre of "like 1982's 'E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,' but with sex" is unexpectedly rich, spanning such films as 1984's "Splash" and "Starman," 1985's "Starcrossed," and even 1986's "Howard the Duck." But "Earth Girls Are Easy" benefits from the fact that Goldblum and Davis were actually married at the time, and their real-life chemistry suffuses their quirky goofball characters. Thankfully, their romance leads to a far less grisly outcome than when they co-starred in David Cronenberg's "The Fly" in 1986.

Wild At Heart

As close to a "straight" love story as the non-Euclidean angles of David Lynch's mind are capable of delivering, this surrealist country-fried take on "The Wizard of Oz" from 1990 can be experienced, but never properly explained.

In "Wild at Heart," Lynch generates electric frisson by casting real-life mother-daughter duo Diane Ladd and Laura Dern in this gritty noir fable about a domineering mother, Marietta Fortune, who is determined to kill her daughter Lula's hoodlum boyfriend, "Sailor" Ripley, played with an Elvis Presley sneer by Nicolas Cage.

As ghastly as this film gets, with Lynch's recurring crew of professionally twisted character actors rendered especially grotesque — Willem Dafoe's prosthetic teeth are terrifying — its denouement explicitly calls upon Cage's weak-willed ne'er-do-well to choose the redemption of love and commitment. Sherilyn Fenn (Audrey Horne from Lynch's "Twin Peaks," which premiered that same year) stands out as the sole survivor of a two-car accident, a broken porcelain doll who dies in front of Sailor and Lula.

Pump Up The Volume

In "Pump Up the Volume," Christian Slater is an anonymous, foul-mouthed pirate radio DJ who can't work up the nerve to speak out as provocatively in his day-to-day life until he connects with an inquisitive and insightful classmate, played by Samantha Mathis, who's written him filthy letters as an adoring and equally depraved fan.

While the film's profanity-laden language and deliberately unsubtle political statements are downright confrontational, its more low-key moments depict the teen years as a paradoxical period of shared loneliness. Even its boldest characters hide behind microphones, telephones, and handwriting to give voice to what they can't say face-to-face.

This 1990 film showcases what's still the best acting performance of Slater's career, and in an era of pervasive social media and online discourse, its portrayal of the communal yet faceless isolation of adolescence remains as relevant as ever.

L.A. Story

As its title telegraphs, this "L.A. Story" aspired to be a singular send-up of all the narcissistic absurdities of Los Angeles in the late '80s and early '90s, with Steve Martin presiding over its broad satire with a deftly droll touch. But, somewhere along the way, it also becomes an affecting and even spiritual exploration of what it means to love someone.

Martin's character is tired of his meaningless life as a "wacky" TV meteorologist in a city so sunny that it renders weathermen useless. That's when he starts receiving messages from a freeway traffic sign that seems to be giving life advice intended specifically for him.

Sarah Jessica Parker elicits big laughs as a shamelessly shallow young model named "SanDeE*" (yes, with that exact spelling, capitalization, and a "star at the end") with whom Martin hooks up. But we also see his plaintive yearning for something more profound with a London journalist played by Victoria Tennant (his real-life wife at the time), all while we're treated to the ethereal music of Enya and observations such as, "A kiss may not be the truth, but it is what we wish were true."

Dead Again

Hey, it's Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, back when they were a celebrity power couple, with Derek Jacobi in a supporting role … in a film that's not a Shakespeare adaptation? And is that a random appearance by Robin Williams? What's going on?

"Dead Again" is a head-trip of a neo-noir murder mystery, complete with amnesia, hypnosis, reincarnation, memories of past lives, and the recurring imagery of lethal scissors, but for all its plot twists and red herrings, its central questions are these: Are our fates predetermined? Are our underlying natures fixed (and therefore unfixable)? If two souls have fallen in love before, can they change how things will work out between them in their next lives? Or are they doomed to repeat the same tragic outcomes?

Despite its age, I won't spoil the plot of this 1991 supernatural psychodrama, because its constant switchbacks will keep new viewers on their toes. Branagh, Thompson, and Jacobi all lend the proceedings an operatic air, and Williams is morbidly laugh-out-loud hilarious. It feels like his character just accidentally wandered onto set from a totally different film.

True Romance

Christian Slater returns to this list as a Detroit comic book store clerk who has hallucinatory conversations with Elvis (played by an obscured but unmistakable Val Kilmer), but it's Patricia Arquette who steals "True Romance," and our hearts, as a Tallahassee call girl named Alabama. After the cutest of 1993's cinematic meet-cutes, our couple hits the road to unload a suitcase full of drugs from Alabama's dead pimp, and to stay one step ahead of both the mob and the cops.

Slater has never been cooler, Arquette has never been more adorable, and their love affair remains endearing and earnest, even as each successive plot twist grows ever more improbable and adrenaline-driven thanks to Quentin Tarantino's crackerjack script and the sharklike momentum of Tony Scott's direction.

The entire supporting cast is wildly overqualified, but watch out for James Gandolfini, six years before "The Sopranos," as a hauntingly meditative hitman.

The Crow

So far, I've mostly opted for films that feature their romances in the present tense, that make their love stories relatively central to the plot, and that have fairly uplifting resolutions. By contrast, the romantic relationship in 1994's "The Crow" is over before the film even starts. Eric Draven and his fiancée, Shelly Webster, are left for dead on Devil's Night in Detroit, the day before their wedding — "Who the f*** gets married on Halloween anyhow?" "Nobody" — and one year before Eric returns from the dead as the Crow.

Still, the emotional heft of Brandon Lee's performance as Eric is how he invests every gesture with an all-encompassing grief over having lost the one person in the world he loved the most. Whether he's playing the Crow as vengeful or remorseful, Lee comes across at every moment as bone-tired just from the effort of being alive.

You see it in the smallest details, such as when the deeply underrated Ernie Hudson, as the one cop on Eric's side, asks if he's going to vanish into thin air again. When Lee replies, "I thought I'd use your front door," his voice is practically choking back sobs, and his eyes are glassy with unshed tears. This is a man whose lost love has left him hurting so much that you feel relieved when he's finally able to lay down and die a second time.

Besides being tragically romantic, "The Crow" is also a perfect Halloween film, so like 1993's "The Nightmare Before Christmas," it's seasonally versatile.

The Fifth Element

With "The Fifth Element," writer-director Luc Besson delivered what should have been the live-action sequel to the 1981 animated classic "Heavy Metal," transporting us to a far-future packed with enough mythology for a dozen sci-fi franchises.

An evil force prophesied by the ancient Egyptians has returned from the far reaches of the cosmos to destroy the Earth in the 23rd century. All that stands in its way are a shell-shocked war veteran turned taxi driver named Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) and a girl without a past named Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) who tells him that she's "The Fifth Element" of legend.

This is one of the few action-romance films where both halves of the couple pull equal duty in terms of both fighting scenes and emotional breakdowns. Jovovich's Leeloo is a flawless combatant who is nonetheless horrified by war, and Willis' Korben Dallas is a reflexively effective soldier who has to get over his own emotional damage to open his heart to Leeloo. Besides all that, acclaimed French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz has a hilariously random cameo as an inventive but ill-fated mugger.

Ever After: A Cinderella Story

As a decade, the 1990s wore its revisionary spirit on its sleeve. "Ever After," a radical reinterpretation of "Cinderella" from 1998, makes its motives clear by setting the age-old fairy tale in Renaissance-era France and transforming its put-upon servant girl into a self-rescuing damsel in distress, whom we see espousing ideas that would have been almost anachronistically progressive for that time.

Years before Disney's direct-to-video animated sequels did the same in the 2000s, Drew Barrymore's Cinderella successfully redeems one of her two "ugly stepsisters," played by the actually quite fetching future "Yellowjackets" star Melanie Lynskey. However, her wicked stepmother (Anjelica Huston, clearly having the time of her life) and her other stepsister are consigned to a deservingly dire fate for their mistreatment of their family members.

Barrymore's Cinderella not only affects her own release after being sold to a lecherous old landowner played by Richard O'Brien ("Say hello, Riff!"), but she also broadens the mind of her Prince Charming (Dougray Scott). All this, and we get to see Leonardo da Vinci (no, really) make this Cinderella's gossamer-winged dress for the ball, too.

Warm Bodies

When I first heard this 2013 film described as "Twilight" with zombies instead of vampires, I must admit that I initially gritted my teeth. But what I actually got when I watched it was a delightfully canny, moving twist on "Romeo and Juliet" that manages to justify its "Power of Love" ending.

In the years since he starred in 2002's "About A Boy," Nicolas Hoult has learned how to weaponize his alien strangeness into a winningly guileless charm. He puts this to good use as a zombie named "R," who's understandably discontented with the ennui of his existence, not to mention conflicted about those he's killed. That changes when his heart literally starts beating again after he falls in love with a human girl named Julie, played by Teresa Palmer.

Just as zombie plagues spread like viruses, so too does the resurgence of life and human emotions start to spread through the zombies as a result of the love that grows between R and Julie. Bonus points to Rob Corddry as R's zombie best friend "M," and Lio Tipton as Julie's friend Nora, both of whom supply plenty of laughs on the side.

Read this next: 14 Greatest Romance Films Of All Time

The post Offbeat romantic movies that are highly underrated appeared first on /Film.