Several questions: was filming/editing of this completed? Is it available direct-to-video or bootleg? And is it really as legendarily bad as I’ve heard or just sub-par?
I’ve seen several stills from it.
It looked craptacular.
It was completed, for what it’s worth. You can always find bootlegs of it at comic book conventions, or possibly on eBay or with other online vendors. But I’ve heard it is bad. Not “fun bad,” but “unwatchably bad.”
I’ve got a copy. It’s barely watchable, but I’ve seen worse. It’s “70’s low budget TV action movie” bad. The worst “effect” is Sue Storm’s “invisibilty effect”. Just half-screen trickery. The Thing didn’t look TOO bad. The Human Torch was just a cartoon. It’s about as “good” as the Justice League TV movie. Both would’ve made excellent MST3K fodder.
Seen it. Scary bad. The best thing about it is the sound effect for Dr. Doom’s armor. Take a soda can and bend it, then bend it back again. Do this about a hundred times. This is the sound of Dr. Doom walking. Or gesturing. Or doing anything else!
Very true. Especially since FF was helmed by Roger Corman.
I’ve seen it too. A comic freak friend of mine got a bootleg at some comic con. My description would be Inadventant Camp. You get the feeling Corman tried to craft an epic worthy of the FF title but instead squirted out a formless generic non-action movie.
I’m not a huge fan of detailed backstory, especially when I already know it, but FF has ridiculously little:
Hi, my name’s Reed. Me and my pilot buddy Ben are going into space. We’d like to take Sue and Johnny with us but I’m not going to tell you why.
Next scene: Space.
The Thing looked OK, but it was quite obviously foam rubber. Which is funny, because it moves like foam rubber but bullets spark as they ricochet off it, and there’s a lot of cheesy foley with the sounds of rocks banging around. You can’t help but notice the foamrubbericity. There’s also an unexplainable Hulk-like transformation.
The Human Torch is best described as a tweaking meth freak.
The other two just aren’t worth mentioning beyond what has already been said.
There’s lots of trite movie villain no-nos that Victor von Doom, Super Genius engages in:
mwahaha I have you right where I want you, now I have to leave for a few seconds but i’ll be back to kill you, mwahaha, I’m back… what the? seize them!
and
villain hanging from ledge, hero tries to save him, mwahahaha, villain drops to his death, OR DOES HE?
Crap all the way.
From what I understand, there’s an interesting story behind the movie. I have no idea if it’s true or not, so don’t ask me to cite it.
Supposedly, some production company or other had obtained the movie rights to the “Fantastic Four” trademark, copyrights, and so on. They’d gotten them at a bargain price, back before the first Batman film really made comic book guys marketable.
Unfortunately, they were apparently unable to get an actual feature film off the ground, for one reason or another. Reasons vary, here, depending on who you’re listening to.
However… options have an expiration date. The situation was this: if they released a motion picture, they could keep the option at minimal cost, as well as EXTEND it, for the sake of sequels and merchandising, right?
But if they DIDN’T make a movie… the option expired, and they lost everything, including the $$$ they’d paid for the option in the first place.
Plainly, a movie of some sort needed to be made. So the producers marched to the cheapest, yet most dependable film outfit in Hollywood: Roger Corman. And they offered him a deal of some sort, which involved a flat fee and a bankroll to make the movie with. Corman apparently tossed the whole thing to his daughter, who supposedly oversaw the production and, to some reports, directed the film. Reportedly, the budget was somewhere in the vicinity of one million dollars. Period. For a feature film.
Once in the can, the film was given a token release (ONE copy of the film was made) and then allowed to slip into limbo. It was never released to video; the cost was viewed as prohibitive, and who’d want to buy the thing, anyway?
…but someone was apparently alone with the master copy long enough to run a copy to video.
…and supposedly, EVERY SINGLE PIRATE COPY out there is descended from that one pirate daddy…
It’s easy to find for DLing via Kazaa.
Wow, this in one comic to movie I was really hoping they’d put off for at least another 10 years or so. How awful. Even today I don’t think the FX are ready to make these guys anything but silly. Maybe an all CGI movie would be worth a rental. Maybe.
Some comics just shouldn’t be movies. Ever.
Wow, this in one comic to movie I was really hoping they’d put off for at least another 10 years or so. How awful. Even today I don’t think the FX are ready to make these guys anything but silly. Maybe an all CGI movie would be worth a rental. Maybe.
Some comics just shouldn’t be movies. Ever.
Well, a big-budget, big-studio version of Fantastic Four has been in preproduction for a while now, at least since Spider-Man made it big. Peyton Reed was attached as the director, but he recently quit. No cast has been announced to the best of my knowledge.
You can go to upcomingmovies.com for the story on this.
It’s scheduled to open Christmas 2004, but they have no director or cast yet.
The script was written by Sam Hamm with several rewrites.
Is it worse than the Nick Fury flick with David Hasselhoff that I momentarily mistook for Hudson Hawk on Sci-Fi the other night?
Um… Caveman… are you old enough to remember the old “Captain America” TV series from the 1970s? Starring Reb Brown?
It was about that bad. And with about that budget.
And Captain America didn’t even have to turn invisible or fly or anything.
This must have been set for release at some point, since I can remember seeing previews for this movie on one or two direct-to-video films.
Looked liked utter crap, it did.
While offering no substantive cites, I’ll back up Wang-Ka, to the extent that his story of the creation of the film is the one I’ve heard for years, from various places.
IMDB’s information:
Confirms alot of the details. The user comments are quite amusing- often intentionally.
It also stated the budget was a whopping 1.5 million. Not good.
IMDB’s information:
Confirms alot of the details. The user comments are quite amusing- often intentionally.
It also stated the budget was a whopping 1.5 million. Not good.
I own a copy. It’s not a great movie, but that’s mostly the budget. Its heart is in the right place, and it’s probably more true to the comic than any big-budget film is going to be. The actors are entirely adequate, it covers the origin story in a coherent manner, the costumes are right. I’ve seen much much worse movies.
Rocketeer, I think your namesake was the closest comic-to-movie adaptation ever.