Film Threat magazine, October 1993

Featuring (as the cover suggests) an article on the 90s Fantastic Four movie… It’s a hefty 16-page article packed with background info, behind-the-scenes photos, interviews with the cast and crew, etc.

Directed by Roger Corman and starring a cast of then little-known actors, most of whom have gone on to remain little-known, the movie was rushed into production in order to retain the rights. (Apparently the contract they’d signed with Marvel had a clause that stipulated that the rights would revert to Marvel if the movie wasn’t completed by a certain time… Something like that. It’s all very confusing. Last year saw the release of Doomed - a brand-new in-depth documentary about the movie. I don’t yet had a copy of that but it’s on the must-buy list.) This is why subsequent Fantastic Four movies have been produced by Constantin Film, the company that co-owned the rights with Roger Corman.

Film Threat’s whole sumptuous, optimistic article ends with “The Fantastic Four is tentatively scheduled to open Labor Day at a theater near you.” Labor Day, for the non-Americans, is the first Monday in September. It has nothing to do with babies, apparently. Anyway, Labor Day 1994 came and went without any sign of The Fantastic Four movie being released. And so did the following Labor Day, and the one after that…

The movie has never been officially released in any form, but bootleg versions are pretty easy to find. The picture quality isn’t very good, but it’s clear enough to see that the movie itself isn’t very good either. But that’s not for want of trying: Yes, it’s silly and cheap, and it hasn’t aged nearly as well as Marvel’s other 1990s movies The Punisher and Captain America, but it’s still fun, which is a lot more than can be said for the breathtakingly dull 2015 Fantastic Four movie.

Also: this movie’s version of The Thing (AKA Ben Grimm) is by far my favourite, even though the subsequent versions – foam costume for the 2005 version, CGI for the 2015 version – probably cost more to put on screen than this entire movie.