Fantastic Four(1994)

Tags

Fantastic Four, Forgotten Movies, Roger Corman

When you talk about forgotten movies, this one ranks right up there. Technically I guess, it should be called a supposed to be forgotten movie. I recall during the period the excitement that there was to be a Fantastic Four movie, Magazines had articles about it, a Roger Corman film with a budget of six million dollars(that probably wouldn’t equal the food budget on today’s big scale features. A big deal back then though. The story was most of the crew worked for scale just to get the picture done.

The cast was mostly unknowns: Reed Richards was played by Alex Hyde-White, Sue Storm(Rebecca Staab), Johnny Storm(Jay Underwood), Ben Grimm(Michael Bailey Smith), the Thing(Carl Ciarfalio), and Victor Von Doom(Joseph Culp). The only cast member I recognized was George Gaynes, the professor during Richards and Doom’s college days.

The story was of a passing comet that the two students were to try to harness energy. Richards was nervous about them not running simulations as he was worried about some of Doom’s calculations. Doom was confident though and they went ahead. the experiment, of course, went bad and Doom was caught in the energy beams, thought dead, but horribly scarred and hustled out of the hospital as a corpse.

Jump ten years and Richards and the other three go up in an experimental spacecraft as the same comet passes. You know the rest. They become the FF and superheroes.

there’s a villain called the jeweler that causes the crash, substituting the diamond powering things for a substitute. Doom reappears as we known him and wants the diamond..

It wasn’t a bad film, but rights were purchased for a few million and all prints were ordered destroyed. A big budget film was in early planning stages and they were afraid this would cheapen the product. As usually happens, all prints were not destroyed and this thing has been floating around for years. Youtube has a copy posted and that’s where I saw it.