Corman’s FANTASTIC FOUR: Still Bad After All These Years
REEL RETRO CINEMA: New looks at old flicks and their comic-book connections… Fantastic Four returns this week after a long layoff and we’ve been celebrating the First Family’s illustrious past (click here). Of course, as great as FF has been on the printed page, the team hasn’t fared quite so well on screen – and the Four’s schlockiest adventure is doubtlessly Roger Corman’s zero-budget “extravaganza.” So who better to tackle the epically bad epic than Rob Kelly – he of our REEL RETRO CINEMA column? No one, I tell you. No one. – Dan — By ROB KELLY To celebrate the return of the Fantastic Four to the pages of Marvel Comics, 13th Dimension major domo Dan Greenfield asked me to review Roger Corman’s infamous 1994 attempt at a live-action FF film. Presumably I have done something to anger him, and this is his passive-aggressive way of getting revenge on me. But since I want to keep writing REEL RETRO CINEMA columns, I guess I have no choice. So, suit up, everyone, this is going to be a bumpy ride. I am old enough to remember hearing about some sort of FF film in the early ’90s, via fan magazines. Every so often, Stan Lee would talk about it in a Bullpen Bulletins column, but I had long before dismissed anything in those as Mighty Marvel Manner-esque hyperbole. But then, one day, I saw this: I remember my reaction was two-fold. First, wow, this is really happening—there’s really a Fantastic Four movie! Second, wow, this does, uh, not look good. What’s with the weird face Johnny is making? Why does Sue look bored? Those costumes look kinda cheap. Is this what a Fantastic Four movie is going to look like? And then…nothing. I basically never heard of the movie again, as if it had never existed. Marvel never brought it up, it was certainly never released, so, as much as I thought about it (which wasn’t much — I had the utter collapse of the Batman movie franchise to worry about), I assumed the movie was never finished. Then one day I saw a bootleg of it at a comic con, and was floored—wait, this movie really exists? There’s a Fantastic Four movie out there and no one’s talking about it? How can this be? I bought a...
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