Marty Langford's Doomed!: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's The Fantastic Four is a fascinating documentary that gives a glimpse into the behind the scenes shenanigans and Machiavellian escapades that can bury a motion picture - much to the understandable chagrin of all the people (both cast and crew) who put the hard work and time into creating a film that would be sabotaged by higher-ups sucking on the schlong of Mammon.
When German producer Bernd Eichinger, head of New Constantin Films, acquired the rights from marvel Comics to make a movie of The Fantastic Four, he had until the end of 1992 to begin physical production before his option on the property lapsed. Hurriedly shopping the project around some of the cheaper/lower-end studios such as Lloyd Kaufman's Troma (Kaufman ultimately balking at the thought of the fan uproar at anything they'd be able to put out for the stipulated co-production budget of $1 million) before reaching a deal with the legendarily able to put out a film with a weekend and some spare change Roger Corman of Concorde/New Horizons. A similar situation was simultaneously unfurling across the pond, where Peter Litten and George Dugdale were frantically trying to get production started on their long-gestating Doctor Who film (their production house going through various name changes from Coast-to-Coast to Green Light to God knows what between 1988 and 1994) before the rights reverted to the BBC. Unlike Litten & Dugdale, who were unable to make the prescribed start of filming date, Corman's low budget powerhouse managed to get a draft script written, undertake a frantic casting process and assemble a crew by cut-off point of December 1992; the main shoot would be over before the end of January 1993 with only a very brief break for Christmas.
Director Oley Sassone had previously shot music videos for acts such as Bruce Hornsby and the Range, Juice Newton, Wang Chung and Mr Mister (including the classic [sic] 'Broken Wings') before helming his debut feature with 1992's Bloodfist III: Forced to Fight starring kickboxing champ Don 'The Dragon' Wilson and Shaft himself Richard Roundtree.
Starring Alex Hyde-White (the time travelling star of the 1986 classic Biggles: Adventures in Time) as Reed Richards, Rebecca Staab (who has a long list of credits, but who I best know as the ill-fated Daphne Collins in the early '90s re-version of Dan Curtis' goth opera Dark Shadows [on the subject of which: RIP Barnabas Mk II Ben Cross; you were also great as Other Sarek in the 2009 Star Trek and Other Running Bloke in Chariots of Fire) as Susan Storm, Jay Underwood (the titular Boy Who Could Fly from the '80s) as Johnny "Flame On!" Storm and Michael Bailey Smith (who would inherit the role of the cannibalistic Pluto from pop-eyed icon Michael Berryman for the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes) as Ben Grimm, the film charts the youthful university-set exploits of science boffin Richards and his best frenemy and rival Victor von Doom (Joseph Culp, son of veteran thesp Robert Culp) as they strive to capture and harness the energy of a spacial phenomenon known as Colossus ("A radioactive comet-like energy source travelling in ten-year orbits", as their professor played by George Gaynes - Police Academy's Commandant Lassard himself - puts it).
When the attempt goes haywire causing Victor to absorb a ..uh... colossal amount of mysterious space radiation that also burns him into a human cinder and his 'remains' go missing from the hospital morgue - spirited away by his Latverian henchmen and rebuilt inside a metallic armoured suit as the throne-dwelling supervillain Doctor Doom - Reed devotes the next decade to re-enacting the experiment and getting it right in the name of the friend he believes to have perished. Deciding this time to go to Colossus rather than trying to siphon its energies Earthward, Richards takes his three-man, one-woman crew on a shuttle ride into orbit where all four of them find themselves bathed in the strange radiation. Reed becomes the super-elasticated Mr Fantastic, Sue the Invisible Woman with the abilities to vanish and generate unseen force fields, Johnny the pyrokinetic propensity to become a twisted firestarter and turn into an anthropomorphic flame named the Human Torch, and Ben is transformed into the monstrous craggy rock hominid the Thing (Carl Ciarfalio in an animatronic suit that's not half bad for the era and budget - it's features are certainly expressive and it's actually a physical presence rather than today's CGI).
Using their new-found powers, the team must stay together in order to battle not only the megalomaniac plots of Doom (Culp giving a splendidly melodramatic performance that projects to the back row through the inexpressive metal mask) but also the mole man-like Jeweler (Ian Trigger, like a stunted cross betwixt Leprechaun and Freddy Krueger) and his abduction designs upon Ben's blind sculptress girlfriend Alicia Masters (Kat Green). Let's say it all together: "IT'S CLOBBERIN' TIME!"
Indeed.
The hard work was to be undone by Marvel movie honcho Avi Arad and executive producer Bernd Eichinger, who made a deal over the heads of the production team to cease and desist all publicity and bury the flick in favour of doing multi-million bucks business with Twentieth Century Fox and Chris Columbus. The cast, led by Hyde-White, had been doing rounds of publicity on the convention circuits on their own dime when the edict came down from above to stop and the anticipated premiere at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota was promptly cancelled. The finished prints of the film - which had only been completed by Sassone and editor Glenn Garland sneakily completing the editing themselves whilst working on a subsequent project - were seized (Sassone and Garlnd's illicit night time torchlit prowl around the production facility to try and grab the reels before they vanished being too late and finding them already gone) and presumably languish somewhere deep in the Fox vault, Wicker Man-reminiscent rumours of the cans being buried somewhere in Kentucky persisting.
Their devious deal done, Fox and Eichinger would take just over a decade to put out their preferred version of the film, that thing with Jessica Alba as Sue and the bloke from Nip/Tuck as Doom that cost a hundred times more and is a tenth as enjoyable, and after the sequel to that effort the property would be rebooted once again in the absolutely disastrous 2015 omnifuckery hallucinated by Josh Trank.
It may be a low bar to vault, but of the four (to date) Fantastic Four movies, the early '90s flick is by far the most enjoyable and the one most faithful to the spirit of the Lee and Kirby comics. For my money, anyway. Hopefully one day some coke-addled exec will see a flash of sense and get the negatives dusted down and cleaned up. With luck, they can involve the still-enthusiastic Sassone and maybe spruce up the edits, effects and vocal dubs to the standard that they always should have been. Get it out there. It's doing nobody any good mouldering in a vault. I can buy the Reb Brown Captain America films and the Peter Hooten Dr Strange, why can't I see this?
Sod Tim Story, and definitely sod Trank.
#ReleaseTheSassoneCut
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