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.