Super Movies! The one Marvel unmovied

 

Title: The Fantastic Four

What Year?: 1993 (post-production)/ 1994 (known showing)

Classification: Unmovie/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Ow, My Brain!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

One of the realities of writing is that there are always ideas and projects that you don’t get to. One of mine that goes a long way back was to do a series on what I dub “unmovies”, films that aren’t necessarily lost but were willfully censored, suppressed and flat-out dropped from any authorized distribution. At various times, I went through quite a bit of material, and further considered just what would or wouldn’t qualify. But there was one I knew I had to cover sooner or later, and once I thought of this feature, I knew it was going to be the big one. If you are anything like me, you’d know even without looking that I’m talking about The Fantastic Four, Roger Corman edition.

Our story begins with a quick introduction to Reed Richards and Victor Von Doom, two scientists ready to complete their great work. Things go awry, and a doctor announces that Victor has died of severe burns. A time jump later, Richards tries the experiment again, this time in a spaceship with his romantic interest Susan and family members Jonny and Ben aboard. Again, things go wrong, only  instead of being dead or crippled, they acquire super powers. On returning to Earth, they run afoul of authorities who want them confined for study and a conspiratorial clique led by none other than Victor Von Doom, whose reported death proves somewhat exaggerated. While Dr. Doom works on a superweapon with no obvious functionality, the team must come to terms with the transformation, particularly Ben, who has become an ugly rock creature. Add in a beautiful, blind artist and a subterranean villain, and you have a super hero movie worth a million bucks… in ca 1990 dollars.

The Fantastic Four was produced by Bernd Eichinger based on the Marvel comic first published in 1961. The German producer had approached Marvel for the rights to the characters as early as 1983, but did not secure funding until 1992, when chronic offender Roger Corman (see Battle Beyond the Stars, Forbidden World, etc, etc) provided an estimate $1 million to produce the film. While sources then and since speculated whether the film was intended for theatrical or any other release, detailed reports exist of plans for a US premiere, as well as a genuinely impressive “word of mouth” promotional campaign. Shortly before a first showing scheduled in early 1994, an agreement was reached for Marvel to pay for the expenses associated with the film in exchange for its withdrawal from all circulation. Afterward, the very existence of a finished film was sometimes questioned until it became available through “bootleg” tapes. Eichinger produced a new treatment of the franchise in 2005, which led to a 2007 sequel and a “reboot” in 2015. A documentary titled Doomed was also released in 2015, covering the history of the original film.

In hindsight, the most interesting question to emerge from the Fantastic Four movie is whether the comic was relevant or “filmable” in the 1990s or at any other time. The most noteworthy feature of the comic was its positive portrayal of science, an innovative take for a genre where villainous mad scientists were the norm. It was still a relevant and constructive message in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when more “mainstream” media were fixated on the stereotype that intelligent men must be unathletic, uncool and/ or “gay”. By then, however, there were already plenty of balanced depictions of science and masculinity that could have resonated just as well, notably Iron Man. On further consideration, the characters, style and themes of the comic were better suited to animation, which had in fact already produced a mixed bag of treatments. The problem on that front was that there weren’t many good candidates left to handle it outside the Disney hierarchy. If anyone had both the talent and the style for a Marvel animated feature, it was Ralph Bakshi, whose work I have so far taken care to avoid reviewing, and bringing him to an already troubled property would have been like handing Howard the Duck to Paul Verhoeven.

All of that merely brings us back to the movie at hand. What will quickly become apparent is that it has been a Rorschach test, very much on par with the likes of Plan 9 From Outer Space. People either want to say it’s terrible, or find some basis to defend it. In these terms, the contrarians have the better point. Obviously, the movie’s production values are outlandishly low, arguably on a literal Ed Wood level with adjustments for inflation, while the further execution struggles to reach the level of marginal competence. Even so, it manages a coherent and moderately interesting treatment of deceptively complex source material. The characters have clear identities and motivations, their actions including their use of their powers reflect both their personalities and their situations, and the story ends with a resolution to the problems posed in their relationships.

To define the comparative good and inarguably bad in the movie, I’m going straight to the “one scene” a little early, a confrontation between the film’s two villains, Dr. Doom and a subterranean mutant known as the Jeweler. In preceding scenes, the Jeweler stole a giant crystal important to Reed Richards’ research, as apparently intended by Doom, but now the doctor comes to collect it. There’s a decent enough action sequence as Doom and his reasonably capable henchmen plow through the lesser villain’s minions. The moment is somewhat brought down by the delivery of Doom’s dialogue by Benjamin Culp, a clearly competent actor who can’t seem to handle this role without sounding like Rick Moranis as Dark Helmet. Then, in a completely surreal and obviously futile move, the Jeweler seizes the artist, whom he previously abducted in hopes of making her his queen, and uses her as a human shield. Never mind that she means nothing to Doom, never mind that she will certainly be even less receptive after this, there’s still a real tension, if only because Doom seems too surprised to ridicule his adversary.

Meanwhile, the fundamental problem with the movie both in itself and as a marketed property is that it had nowhere to go. There was no way it was going to be taken seriously in theaters in the wake not only of Batman but Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. It simply didn’t have the money to compete on that level, nor did it have the creative energy that could have put it on the level of cheapies like Killer Klowns From Outer Space (which still had twice its budget). Some might have hoped to go straight to the direct-to-video circuit, except that market was already getting far more competitive, as evidenced by Deep Space and for that matter The Punisher. The one venue where it could have had a chance was as a TV pilot, particularly for a syndicated series, which somebody might have been thinking of. Yet even there, the competition would have been a bit much. It certainly didn’t look as good as The Flash from 1990 or MANTIS from 1994 (does anybody else remember seeing that one?), though those were network shows. It could still have passed muster among daytime and weekend syndicated slots, which had previously supported superhero shows like Superboy and My Secret Identity (still at least equal to this!), except that market was about to get stomped by Hercules, Xena and the cable hand-me-down Outer Limits revival. What the film really feels like is some relic of an alternate history, where people like Corman were trying to make Marvel superhero properties in the 1960s.

That finally brings us again to the question of whether this movie is “good” or “bad”. The real reason I have left this one unrated is because I personally cannot see a fair or accurate frame of reference. As a theatrical release after 1990, it is ludicrously amateurish, and in that context, Marvel’s direct intervention was certainly and completely justified. The counterpoint is that the people who made it must have recognized that on some level, or they would not have taken the money to walk away. In the proverbial final analysis, rating a movie like this is like critiquing a writer for a journal he wrote in secret and ordered burned. If the work’s own creator chose not to let it see the light of day, the blame lies elsewhere if others dig it up and discover it’s not great. Let the blame fall on its time, and let credit go to those who moved on to better things.

The image credit goes to Rusty Staples Comic Blog, which offers a good account of the movie's saga.