The Fantastic Four (1994) Movie Review

It’s cheesy, it’s cheap, it’s the '90s adaptation of the first Marvel Superhero team written and drawn by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Genre: Action / Adventure / Sci-Fi

Director: Oley Sassone

Cast: Alex Hyde-White, Jay Underwood, Rebecca Staab, Michael Bailey Smith, Joseph Culp, Robert Alan Beuth, Kat Green & Carl Ciarfalio

Run Time: 90 min.

Release Date - Unreleased

Like with other sequels and reboots that came out this year, I will start a series of reviews that will lead up to the new Fantastic Four movie next week. My first post will concentrate on the unreleased low-budget B film of 1994. Although never published in cinema or on VHS, a copy did make it onto the internet and is still watchable on YouTube. Whether it is worth seeing is another story.

NOTE: Since this is an unreleased movie, never meant to be seen by the public, I will not give it a rating.

There are rumours around the net, amongst others, due to a statement given by Stan Lee in an interview, as to why this B-movie never saw the light of day. According to him, Bernd Eichinger (head of Constantin Film) never intended to release this superhero flick, but produced the film as a way to maintain the rights to create a big-budget version, also known as the 2005 Fantastic Four film.

Reed Richards and his friends, Ben Grimm, Susan Storm and her young brother Johnny, fly to space to collect data on specific cosmic rays. The voyage goes awry, and the four crash-land on an island, where they figure out they have been bestowed with superpowers. A mysterious villain named Doom decides to capture them and harness their gifts to become the most powerful man on Earth. The group manage to escape and decides to fight Doom to foil his plans of world domination.

If you haven’t seen this movie, you didn't miss much! It is a truly terrible movie, but it does have some redeeming qualities. I was surprised by how close the story remained to the original plot of the first issues. It truly tried to stay true to the source material. I also liked the way they reacted to their powers. It wasn’t the standard: “Hey, we have superpowers, let’s be heroes and save lives.” They were scared of what happened to them!

Other than that, the film sucked, even for a ’90s B-movie. It was given a very corny tone, and every line in the dialogue was dramatised. The actors even repeated some of their lines, either to fill time or because the production team was worried the audience would not understand the importance of a sentence.

The Characters were represented fine, but the acting was horrible. Mr Fantastic was possibly the best of the bunch, but the work done by Alex Hyde-White was nothing noteworthy. It consisted of awkwardly staring into space or at others.

Bailey Smith gave a horrendous performance as Ben Grimm, aka the Thing. He was over-acting most of the time, and his line delivery was painful. Johnny Storm was a goofy teenage kid who wobbled his arms around a little too much, and Susan Storm was a rather minor character, not really noticeable. It played well with describing why she obtained the power of invisibility, but that is not really the Invisible Woman I remember from the comics.

Doctor Doom was just terrible! Culp gave one of the worst performances in this superhero flick. The villain is a comically goofy character, has the worst villain laugh and does not feel threatening at all. Every word that came out of his mouth was overdramatised. And why did he always need to touch everybody’s face or body? I felt really uncomfortable watching him.

It is hard to talk about cinematography, effects or the sets, knowing that this film was produced with a very low budget. Still, one of the things that really annoyed me was the cheap look of the settings. It reminded me of the spaceship scenes in the late 70s V TV series, and the rubber suit used for the Thing was unforgivable.

On the other hand, I guess most of the budget was spent on the short amount we see the Human Torch fully covered in fire. The effects for that scene had been acceptable for an early 90’s low-budget B flick.

---

Verdict: The Fantastic Four is truly terrible, yet at the same time somewhat entertaining. It did stay true to the source material, and in its own way, it paid respect to the fans of the graphic novel series. I therefore do prefer it to the terrible and insulting high-budget films like Batman & Robin, but I wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone.

Did you see this adaptation of Marvel's long-running series? If so, what did you think of it? Stay tuned to read my review of the Fantastic Four (2005) this Sunday.