Doomed (5 Stars)

This documentary was made in 2016, which was 20 years too late. It's about the 1994 Fantastic Four film, which was never officially released. It only refers to later events or statements as false claims that need to be refuted. For instance, in March 2005 Stan Lee stated in an interview, "That movie was never supposed to be shown to anybody". To refute this there's footage of Stan speaking at a comic convention in 1993, saying that the film was almost finished and would be released at the end of the year. In the same 2005 interview Stan said that he had known nothing about the film. That's even stranger, because he frequently visited the film set during shooting and was very excited about the film. As the director Oley Sassone fondly remembers, he even bought donuts for everyone on one visit.

How did this happen? Was Stan Lee demented in 2005, having forgotten what he did 12 years previously? I think not. He had an active intellect until the end of his life. It's more likely that the Marvel lawyers instructed him what to say in the interview. Stan Lee might be the God of Marvel, revered by fans throughout the world, but in its later years it became a major corporation. The businessmen took over. They told Stan what he could and couldn't say. If they told him to lie, he lied. He was threatened with million dollar lawsuits if he told the truth. What would you have done under such circumstances?

So what really happened? What's the true story hidden beneath all these lies? That's what the documentary attempts to uncover.

In 1986 Constantin Film bought the film rights to the Fantastic Four. There was a clause in the contract that the rights would revert to Marvel if no film were made within six years. Common sense would have told Constantin's owner Bernd Eichinger to get on with it, but there was a delay. He wanted to do the film right, making it look better than the other Marvel films made before then, but he feared that the special effects would cost too much. In 1992 the deadline was drawing ever closer, so he knew he had to do something fast. He asked Roger Corman, well known as a producer of low budget films, if he could make the film for one million dollars. That's a challenge Corman couldn't turn down. He put the project in the hands of the director Oley Sassone, with the instructions that it had to be made fast. The script was written, the cast was assembled, and the filming began on 28th December 1992, fulfilling the terms of the contract. The filming was completed in less than a month, and it went into production. The premiere was scheduled for 4th September 1993, but a week beforehand it was cancelled by legal action from Marvel.

Allegedly, Avi Arad, the CEO of Marvel Studios, bought the film from Roger Corman and burned all the copies without even watching the film. Oley Sassone doubts this. He believes that the tapes still exist in a Marvel vault. There are different claims about the price paid. Oley says that Roger Corman told him in a phone call that he had received a cheque for one million dollars from Marvel. Avi Arad says that he paid a couple of million dollars. It's more likely that Avi Arad's story is true. I don't think Roger Corman would have handed over one of his films for just enough to cover the costs, he would have expected a sizeable profit.

Oley and the cast members didn't take this lying down. On the night after being informed of the premiere's cancellation they broke into Roger Corman's office to steal the tapes. It was too late. They were already gone.

There was never any doubt in the mind of the cast that the film would be shown. There was no money in the budget for promotion, so Alex Hyde-White (Mr. Fantastic) and Joseph Culp (Doctor Doom) spent $20,000 of their own money travelling and promoting the film, expecting to be reimbursed from the film's earnings. They never got their money back.

It was a film that all the cast members loved. They identified with it. Even in this documentary, made 20 years later, they speak about the film with enthusiasm.

Somehow bootleg VHS copies of the film started to appear a few years later. The picture quality varied, depending on whether they were copies of the film or copies of copies of copies. This made the cast happy. This was the first time they had ever seen the completed film. Oley Sassone speculates where the copy has come from. He suspects that it was an illegal copy made when he had the film duplicated in a dubbing studio. He asked for two copies for himself, but it's possible an employee made a third copy for himself. Thank God for film pirates!

The question remains whether the film was any good. Let's forget the deterioration of the bootleg tapes and imagine it in its pristine glory. The script has been praised as being superior to the scripts of the later Fantastic Four films. The acting is adequate, though not up to the standard of the big Hollywood stars who came after them. After seeing the film I can say that it was never their intention to make a B Movie, they were doing their best to create a masterpiece. They might have succeeded if they'd been given more than a month. The screen sets look cheap, if you look closely, but who looks that closely? The biggest problem is the special effects. They look poor, even for the 1990's. That's something that could only have been put right by throwing an extra five million dollars into the film.

As a film fan, I enjoy Roger Corman's "Fantastic Four". Things were done right. It's the only Fantastic Four film so far in which Doctor Doom looks and acts like Doctor Doom.

Critics of this documentary might say that it only tells one side of the story. That wasn't intentional. Stan Lee was invited to participate, but he turned it down, so only archive footage is used. Avi Arad, the key figure in the film's cancellation, was repeatedly asked to participate, but he rudely ignored all the phone calls and emails for 18 months. Obviously he was afraid that under pressure he might accidentally tell the truth