Doomed!: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's The Fantastic Four (2015)

Director: Marty Langford

Cast: Oley Sassone, Alex Hyde-White, Michael Bailey Smith, Roger Corman

Have I Seen it Before: No. I’ve been on a documentary jag as of late, ad this story always fascinated me, but it felt like I should probably go ahead and actually watch the fabled The Fantastic Four (1994) before I did so.

I’m not entirely sure why. Not a lot of people have seen it, especially as the bootleg video market has gone online, then again I can’t imagine people would want to see this without having seen the subject.

Did I Like It: Ultimately, the film covers what it needs to, even without the cooperation of several of the people—some of them, like produce Bernd Eichenger were no longer living at the time of production—responsible for the burying of the first Fantastic Four film. We are ultimately left with speculation more than conclusions as to whether or not the film was ever intended to be released. That’s not a fatal flaw. A documentary can work with that kind of ambiguity.

The problem is two-fold. First, we never really get a sense of the story of the people behind the film. We see how Oley Sassone—the director of the ill-fated film—fared after the film imploded, but only a small picture of it. We get no sense of how the cast soldiered on, other than a vague sense that they weren’t cashiered out of Hollywood, nor did they see much of a career bump from their efforts. None of them became famous or infamous, and they have to take a strange level of comfort from the fact that their film got more attention for its unfortunate fate. Had Corman and company released the film as was, it would have been rather comprehensively forgotten by the time 1995 rolled around.

Second, the entire film plays out with the production value and editing of a middling DVD special feature. A documentary can be more than what we’re given here. That becomes all the more frustrating when it is very clear that there was more story there to tell.

The Fantastic Four (1994)

Director: Oley Sassone

Cast: Alex Hyde-White, Jay Underwood, Rebecca Staab, Michael Bailey Smith

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Technically, none of us should have seen it, I suppose.

Did I Like It: It’s not great, but the real question is: Was it really bad enough to get buried in the forgotten realms of bootleg videos sold for years at comic book conventions*?

Probably not. It certainly has less of a polish than other superhero films of the era. It wouldn’t measure up against Batman Forever (1995) released only a year later, but then again, anything that might have made The Shadow (1994) look like a classier picture is far from a deal breaker in my book.

This was clearly a b-production, but I never felt it was made with anything less than the best of intentions. It would not have damaged the brand. In fact, it might have been right at home among some second-string genre pictures, especially of a decade earlier. It’s a fair sight better than Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), and in all honesty the movie I kept thinking about as things progressed was Masters of the Universe (1987)**. The Fantastic Four is very much in the same league as that film. Then again, this film is resolute in giving us the best Fantastic Four story available at its budget, and never bothers to cheap out and make large parts of the story about some down-to-earth teens.

So, definitely worthy of release, if not quite demanding of adoration.

It would have made a fine—“fine” will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting in this sentence—pilot for an hour-long FF television series that we really never got to see. That show might have even grown into itself over time.

Although, I really could have gone without Reed (Hyde-White) and Sue (Staab) making googly eyes at each other while the latter was still a child (Mercedes McNab). But that hardly warrants the film going unreleased. It lifts right out, and would still only make it the third most problematic film of 1994, behind Ace Ventura: Pet Detective*** and whatever movie Woody Allen made that year.

*The less said about my dear, departed Batgirl, the better off we’ll all be.

**Boy, The Cannon Group is really taking a beating in this review, especially since they had nothing to do with the film in question.

**Boy, the pre-Friends work of Courtney Cox is really taking a beating in this review.