It was a tension-filled shoot. The rising star and the director didn't get along.

When the test screenings were disastrous the producers added a voiceover narration, hoping to make the story comprehensible to baffled audiences.

It was a flop when it opened in theaters on June 25, 1982.

Yet 25 years later "Blade Runner" is on many lists of the top sci-fi movies of all time.

It has become a cult favorite of hundreds of thousands of young adults who weren't old enough to see the R-rated movie when it played commercially but have watched it repeatedly on home video.

It's credited with ushering in the era of cyberpunk and creating a vision of a dystopian future that writers, filmmakers and comic book artists have been borrowing from ever since. And there are plans to release a new version in theaters this fall, along with a boxed DVD set.

"It's a worldwide phenomenon - that's what so remarkable," said Rutger Hauer, the Dutch actor who starred in the film opposite Harrison Ford and just published a memoir, "All These Moments," which devotes several chapters to the movie. "It works in Japan, Argentina, Russia ... anywhere you go where people watch movies, they know `Blade Runner.' "

"It's definitely influenced my work as an artist," said Joplin, Mo., resident Jeremy Haun, who has drawn Captain America and other Marvel superheroes. "I really like the look and feel of `Blade Runner's' cyberpunk world. It's the perfect meld of sci-fi and crime noir, and the film's use of camera angles and atmosphere still stand out in my mind and creep into my work."

Kansas City-based Federal Express employee Jason Arnold was equally impressed.

"When I first saw it as a kid, there was a lot I didn't understand," he said. "But the more you watch, the more you pick up on."

Not everybody is crazy about the film. Film critic Roger Ebert has written of "Blade Runner": "It looks fabulous, it uses special effects to create a new world of its own, but it is thin in its human story."

But even those who think "Blade Runner" doesn't quite work as drama admit it's a film crammed with astonishing visuals and provocative ideas.

"Blade Runner" is loosely based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," a novel by science fiction legend Philip K. Dick (1928-1982). Though Dick was only moderately successful in his lifetime, his work is now available in any bookstore and has inspired films such as "Total Recall," "Minority Report," "Paycheck," "A Scanner Darkly" and "Next."

Set in Los Angeles in 2019, the film features Ford as Deckard, a "blade runner" who tracks down and "retires" renegade replicants, artificial humans created as slave labor for dangerous off-world colonies.

"Born" as adults, replicants have superhuman strength and a lifespan of just four years. Some are implanted with false memories of childhood. All are prohibited from returning to Earth.

Now five of these creatures have murdered their human keepers, hijacked a rocket and splashed down near Los Angeles. Deckard, a hard-drinking, angst-riddled sleuth in the Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe mold, is brought out of retirement to track them down.

Directing "Blade Runner" was Ridley Scott, who at the time had completed two feature films in Europe ("The Duellists" and "Alien") after a successful career in TV commercials. A visual genius, Scott wasn't an actor's director. He had, he admitted years later, "no time for explanations and stroking."

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