498. The Fantastic Four (1994)

December 28, 2014

My brother-in-law, Benjamin, gave me a stack of Japanese bootleg DVDs for Christmas that a friend of his had given him years ago. One of those was the 2005 'Fantastic Four' movie, but when we put in the disc it was actually the 1994 version produced by Roger Corman. It was gloriously incompetent, and felt like it was made ten to twenty years earlier than it actually was. Two physics students worked on some kind of laser that ended up backfiring during a storm and seemingly killed one of them. A couple doctors hid the fact that he was still alive and decided to worship him as some kind of god. He became Dr. Doom, and had a personal vendetta against his former friend who left him for dead. Ten years later the future was in full force with blinking lights and odd-shaped chairs. The surviving scientist and one of his friends, as well as two much younger friends planned a mission to space using a large diamond that would give them some kind of power in space. Unfortunately for them, a leprechaun stole their diamond and replaced it with a replica that caused their ship to crash. Fortunately for them, they were not harmed in the crash, and instead they each gained powers that accentuated their personalities. One guy could stretch and contort his body at will, one could create fire, the girl could turn invisible and create force fields, and the other guy turned into a rock. For the rest of the movie, the newly empowered heroes fought Dr. Doom and the leprechaun for pretty much no reason and eventually came out on top. It was awful though, and I'd really only recommend it as a joke.