Even though David Lowery has yet to veer into the superhero realm of filmmaking, the “Green Knight” director has thoughts on the legacy of Marvel’s “The Fantastic Four” — specifically the rarely-seen 1994 feature produced by Roger Corman.
During a visit to Kim’s Video at Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Manhattan for its web series (Alamo Drafthouse reopened the influential NYC-rental store in2022 and re-created its iconic facade in-house), Lowery pointed out the unreleased movie among the video store collection.
“I would say it’s probably as good or better than all the ‘Fantastic Four’ movies that have come out so far,” Lowery said, adding that he purchased his own copy of the bootleg VHS from eBay when in high school.
The ’94 film starred Rebecca Staub, Alex Hyde-White, Jay Underwood, Michael Bailey Smith, and Joseph Culp. Oley Sassone directed the film that has a cult following and was made for $1 million. At the time, Fox announced a theatrical release date for May 31, 1994 with a world premiere planned at the Mall of America in Minnesota. Yet neither came to be.
Despite the trailer running in theaters, the film was scrapped due to a “legal loophole,” according to screenwriter Craig Nevius. It’s been long-rumored that producer Bernd Eichinger greenlit the film just to maintain his rights to the characters. Eichinger went on to produce the trio of 20th Century Fox “Fantastic Four” films that starred Jessica Alba and Chris Evans, among others.
A fourth iteration of the “Fantastic Four” films, set in the 1960s and starring Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Julia Garner is on the horizon. Robert Downey Jr. was recently announced as the villainous Dr. Doom for the next “Avengers” film — it is unclear if he’ll be in the new “Fantastic Four.”
“The Fantastic Four” from 1994 was the only unreleased production of Corman’s career. Thirty years later, the feature still spurs online petitions for its distribution.
Indie filmmaker Lowery used the rest of his time to celebrate art-house cinema from decades past — and point out how A24 is now carrying the torch for labels like New Yorker Video. Lowery has partnered with A24 on a trio of films including “The Green Knight,” “A Ghost Story,” and his highly-anticipated upcoming pop drama “Mother Mary.”
“These labels like New Yorker Video were sort of like, in some ways, the A24 of the time, where you knew that you could rent a video from a company like this and even if you didn’t know what it was, it would be worth your time,” Lowery said.
And back in the day, if legendary film critic Roger Ebert like a film, all the better for Lowery. Ebert was not always spot on, tonally, as Lowery noted with Ebert’s infamous highbrow review of cult action film franchise “Death Wish.”
“All of my education as a filmmaker really came from Roger Ebert’s ‘Movie Home Companion,’” Lowery said. “I remember his review of all the ‘Death Wish’ movies, which I’ve still never seen any of them. They always seemed so serious and so deadly. I’ve seen clips now and I’m like, ‘These look not at all like [how] I imagined them from his reviews.’”
Among the titles Lowery picked out at the functional Kim’s Video alcove include Wes Craven’s “Shocker,” New Yorker Video release “I Can’t Sleep,” and “Santa Sangre.”
“I started to expand my idea of what movies were, beyond the rather vanilla stuff my parents let me see,” Lowery said of his theatergoing tastes as he got older. “I found a love of ’80s video horror box art, just like obsessively looking at those. I was cataloging all the titles in my head based on the artwork.”
And with auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and Tim Burton emphasizing other directors in their own work, Lowery’s film education expanded all the more.
“‘Happy Together’ was definitely one that, thanks to Tarantino’s label releasing ‘Chungking Express,’ that introduced me to Wong Kar-Wai, and then I tracked down as many [of his films] as I could,” Lowery said.
He continued, “And thanks to the Tim Burton film [‘Ed Wood’], I went through a major Ed Wood phase. I managed to track down a number of his movies. I remember when ‘Orgy of the Dead’ came out — they actually released it on VHS when I was in high school — and by the time I was 16, I was very excited to see a movie called ‘Orgy of the Dead.’ It didn’t quite live up to my expectations but I suppose it is exactly what I should have expected from an Ed Wood film.”
Check out all of the films Lowery selects in the full video below.
