The Fly

David Cronenberg's remake -- or rather, new version -- of "The Fly" is one of the best science fiction/horror movies ever made, so it has tended to eclipse the original version. But despite some flaws, it's a good, committed movie, definitely worth watching; it's not quite the classic its defenders claim, but is far from the comic disaster that others want it to be.

"The Fly" was based on a novella by George Langelaan that was first published in the U.S. in Playboy, James Clavell wrote the screenplay. Clavell worked for a while as a screenwriter on interesting, if low-budget movies ("Walk Like a Dragon," for example), then quickly ascended the ladder of success both as a screenwriter and novelist. His movies include "The Great Escape," "To Sir With Love" and "The Last Valley," while his novels include King Rat, Shogun and Tai-Pan.

This helps to explain why the script for "The Fly" is not only literate, but concentrates on the relationship between André Delambre (Al Hedison) and his wife Hélène (Patricia Owens). Clavell and director Kurt Neumann knew that this was necessary to give the horror of the last couple of reels the powerful kick it had in 1958. It was a major hit, nearly a phenomenon, and a large part of that is due to the fact that the approach was careful, mature and logical.

As the movie begins, a night watchman comes upon a shocking scene: Hélène has just crushed her husband's head and arm in a giant metal press. Francçois (Vincent Price), André's older brother, is understandably horrified, sure she must have gone insane. Inspector Charas (Herbert Marshall) isn't so sure. The rest of the story is told by Hélène in flashback.

André reveals his new invention to his wife: a machine that can transmit matter from one chamber to another, like TV transmits pictures. The implications of this are staggering, so André works hard at eliminating the problems that keep cropping up. But then one night, Hélène enters the lab to find....

Well, it's part of movie history now, so it's not revealing much to explain that André experimented on himself, unaware a housefly was in the transmission booth with him. He wound up with the fly's head and leg, while his head and arm became part of the fly. Evidently what was really swapped were the atomic patterns, since all legs and heads concerned are in scale to their new bodies.

"The Fly" is very well made, with excellent photography by the inventive Karl Struss. It may seem oddly overlit by today's standards, but in them there ancient times, drive-ins required bright images, and so studios insisted on this style of lighting. Working within it, though, and with CinemaScope, Struss worked wonders. The production design is also excellent, with the laboratory a standout, well-conceived for 'scope. (I think we could have done without the neon tubing, though.)

Al Hedison, soon to change his name to David, is sincere, handsome and attractive; much the same can be said of Patricia Owens. Price doesn't seem to be deeply involved in the story, and actually gives a better performance in the much inferior sequel. Director Neumann was genuinely fond of science fiction, but he was only an average director. "The Fly" was his biggest hit as well as his best movie. There are a few clunker lines here and there ("...a stream of cat atoms..."), and if you don't connect with the movie the spiderweb climax might leave you laughing as it did Price and Marshall on the set. But if the movie does engage you, it's still one of the most horrifying scenes of the 1950s.

The same cannot be said of "Return of the Fly". Edward Bernds wrote and directed; his direction is far superior to his plodding, unimaginative script that requires a very complicated set of events to produce the same effect on André's Philippe as it did on his father. Unfortunately, someone thought to improve on the original movie, and Philippe winds up with a fly head that's in the same ratio to his body as it was on the fly: it's about three feet across, and looks like something you'd see in a Mardi Gras parade. Furthermore, the original film had a clean, tightly focused screenplay: everything relates directly to the matter transmitter and the horrifying consequences of not paying attention. The sequel involves murder, theft, a criminal conspiracy, a fistfight, gunfire ("he disobeyed my order to halt, so I fired"), and other shopworn melodramatic elements.
Brett Halsey, as Philippe, is quite good and very well-cast as Hedison's son; Price is also quite good, but his role is almost entirely reactive. And the photography by Brydon Baker is crisp and clean, occasionally  Gothic.  But "Return of the Fly" is just another horror movie, certainly not up to the level of the precedent-setting original; that was for adults, "Return of the Fly" is, and always was, for kids -- and uncritical kids at that. Even the overlooked "Curse of the Fly" is better.  (Bill Warren, AVRev)

When I first heard about this movie (it’s never been released on videotape, and it has reared its head on TV only very rarely during my lifetime), my initial reaction was something to the effect of: “Okay guys-- you’re really pushing your luck here. I can see why the Delambre boys would want to keep working on Andre’s teleportation gizmo, even in the face of two horrific mishaps, but you’d think the events of the last two movies would have left them very sensitive to the need to keep insects out of the lab whenever the machine was being used.” I mean, come on-- how many times can you “accidentally” stick a fly’s head on a guy before the audience refuses to buy it anymore? But considering how much thought the writer of Return of the Fly put into the need to get around this problem the last time around, I ought to have expected rather more from The Curse of the Fly than I did. And sure enough, this movie takes the most elegant way of all out of the suspension-of-disbelief trap: The Curse of the Fly features no fly-headed guys at all! Instead, it focuses on exactly what its title suggests-- the deleterious effect that a continuing obsession with Andre Delambre’s teleportation machine has had on his descendants, an effect which approaches in its destructiveness the level of a literal curse.

Our story begins with the escape of a young woman named Patricia Stanley (Carole Gray, from Island of Terror and Devils of Darkness) from the mental hospital in which we will later learn she has been confined ever since the death of her mother some years ago. Her escape seems to have been a spur-of-the-moment decision, as she hasn’t even bothered to get dressed first. She just smashes the window to her ground-floor cell, leaps over the sill, and runs off into the night in her underwear. So when she meets up with a passing motorist on the road a while later, it is understandable that the man stops to see if there’s something wrong. The driver turns out to be Martin Delambre (George Baker, who showed up in a variety of minor roles in many of the James Bond movies), the great-grandson (I think-- more on this later) of Andre Delambre, and it just so happens that he and Patricia are both headed for Montreal. Martin, you see, is on a combined business trip-vacation, for the dual purpose of procuring some vital pieces of equipment for his research and taking a much-needed break from the same. Patricia doesn’t really seem to know why she’s going to Montreal; she has no friends or family there, nor does she have a home or a job to go back to in the city. Maybe she just figures it’s the nearest place large enough for her to hide from the asylum employees who are sure to come looking for her when they find her cell empty the next morning. But as it happens, Martin himself proves ample reason for her to stay in Montreal, at least for so long as he’s there, and when the time comes for him to go back to his lab out in the country, she decides she’d like to accompany him there as well. Indeed, Martin and Patricia go and get themselves hitched as the last act of their Montreal adventure.

If ever you needed an illustration of why it’s a bad idea to marry someone you just met a week ago, allow me to suggest The Curse of the Fly. Patricia understandably said nothing to Martin about her escape from an insane asylum, so we can reasonably expect some unpleasant surprises in his future. But that’s nothing compared to the secret Martin is keeping from Patricia. Given that he’s a Delambre, we have some idea what his “research” consists of from the moment he first mentions his name; though he may keep it a secret from Patricia that he’s building a teleportation machine, he can’t keep it a secret from us. Now, considering what happened to Andre and Philippe Delambre in connection with their work on the same project, this could well turn into something that Patricia would want to know about. Then again, she might be even more interested in the fact that Martin turns all gross and lumpy and scaly if he doesn’t shoot himself up with some sort of drug periodically. It doesn’t take a Nobel laureate to figure out that Martin’s two big secrets are connected, and of course they are, if indirectly. Apparently Philippe Delambre kept some fly genes in his system even after he got his own head and limbs back at the end of Return of the Fly, and passed those genes on to his descendants. Martin’s problem is that his body wants to age as rapidly as a fly’s, by which standard he should have died in infancy. The drug he injects controls this accelerated aging, and can even reverse it if it is administered in time, but if he misses a dose, all that time catches up to him in mere minutes. It’s a bad scene all around, and we can forgive the man for wanting to keep a lid on the story.

Now, about that research... As we learn when Martin arrives back home at the mansion in whose basement the lab has been built, both Andre and Philippe Delambre took some of the secrets of the teleporter with them to the grave; the device, in its third incarnation, simply does not work properly. Oh, it’ll zap things and people from place to place most effectively-- Martin’s lab in the Quebec countryside has a mate in London, where his father Henri (Brian Donlevy, best known to folks like us for his portrayal of Professor Quatermass in The Creeping Unknown and Enemy from Space) and brother Albert (Michael Graham) work, and the two labs have been transporting things back and forth across the Atlantic for some time. The problem is that anything living that enters one teleportation cabinet leaves the other one all kinds of fucked up. Henri got off lightly on his last trip to London-- his back is covered with a skin deformity similar to a huge keloid scar, though he stupidly insists on lying to Martin, claiming that his trip was a complete success. Previous volunteers, it is hinted, were not as lucky as Henri. The equipment Martin picked up in Montreal was meant to address this problem.

So who were the previous guinea pigs, and what became of them? Patricia finds out the day after her arrival at the Delambre place when she goes out into the backyard to hide from Police Inspector Ronet (Jeremy Wilkins of Hyper Sapien: People from Another Star), who has come looking for her on behalf of the asylum from which she escaped back at the beginning of the film. While Henri and Martin attempt to convince the detective that Patricia is a Delambre now, and that the asylum will thus have to go through them in order to re-commit her, Patricia herself stumbles upon a row of locked stables, each of which contains some hideous creature. Yup, these are the old volunteers, alright. The teleporter has left them missing eyes or ears; covered in bulging, rugose, scar-like patches; paralyzed in one or more limbs; and even apparently brain-damaged. As we shall soon see, most of these creatures had once been colleagues of the Delambres, but one, the young woman (Mary Manson) in the stall on the far left, had been Martin Delambre’s first wife, Judith! Patricia faints dead away when she lays eyes on the deformed things in the stables, and when she comes to, her husband and father-in-law try to convince her that her faint was merely due to the stress of Ronet’s surprise visit, and that her encounter with Judith and company was just a nightmare she had while unconscious.

And thus the broad pattern for the movie is established. Patricia will go on seeing things she shouldn’t, and Martin and Henri (the latter especially) will play upon her knowledge of her own mental problems in an effort to keep her from learning the truth. Meanwhile, Ronet will be checking into the background of Patricia’s new family, eventually learning the whole sordid story from the now-retired Inspector Charras (Charles Carson), who had been in charge of investigating the death of Andre Delambre in the original The Fly. And back in London, Albert Delambre is becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the sacrifices his father demands of him in the name of the family project. When Ronet finishes putting the pieces together at just about the same time that Albert finally loses his patience and Patricia finally uncovers irrefutable evidence that she really has been seeing all that she believed she had, time has run out for the Delambres, and all hell breaks lose on all three fronts. This time, when all is said and done, the prospects for a third sequel are looking pretty slim.

Among those few who remember it, The Curse of the Fly has about the worst reputation imaginable, and I suspect that goes some way toward explaining its never having seen release on videotape. What seems to bother most people is the complete absence of any flies from the proceedings, which, I admit, could easily get in the way of one’s appreciation of a movie called The Curse of the Fly. But in my opinion, that refusal to do what the audience expects is the best thing about this movie. Yet another fly-in-the-teleporter mishap would be extremely hard to swallow, and the legacy of so intelligent a movie as The Fly really ought not to be tarnished by the sort of dumb-as-a-stump sequel that a more conventional approach would surely have yielded. That what the filmmakers came up with instead is a worthy continuation of the series can, I believe, be seen in the fact that many of the ideas explored here would turn up later in a more intense and horrific form in David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly and its unfortunate 1989 sequel. The concept of the teleportation device functioning as a gene splicer, the special inability of the machine to handle living subjects, the idea that two objects transported at the same time would be fused together rather than have their parts mixed and matched-- Cronenberg would borrow all of these from The Curse of the Fly, and though Cronenberg wove them into a more satisfying whole than is the case here, this movie doesn’t deserve anything like the opprobrium it has received. The worst things I can think of to say about it are that it suffers from an extremely English sense of pacing, and that its creators seem to have had some difficulty keeping the chronology of its back-story straight. At one point, Henri says that three generations of Delambres have devoted their lives to the teleporter project, which would seem to make him the son of Return of the Fly’s Philippe. Then again, when Charras (who would have to be about 120 years old by now if Henri is Philippe’s son) tells Ronet the story of his involvement with the Delambres, he seems to telescope the events of both earlier movies into a single incident, in which case Martin and Albert are that third generation, and Henri is the son of a composite Andre-Philippe character whose post-accident history more closely resembles Philippe’s than Andre’s. Or maybe the character this movie calls Charras is really supposed to be Return of the Fly’s Inspector Beecham. Finally, I suppose it’s also possible that Charras is just senile (which, again, would be no shock at his age), and can no longer keep the two elder Delambres and their similar stories straight. In any event, no one involved in its creation seems to have given much thought to the idea that this movie most likely takes place some 70 years after The Fly. But taken on its own terms, with only minimal reference to its two predecessors, The Curse of the Fly is a thoughtful, well-crafted film that deserves far better than has been its lot in life. (1000 Misspent Hours)

Some horror concepts enter the popular consciousness and take on a life of their own. Oftentimes, these are cinematic manifestations of mythic or literary antecedents—the Frankenstein monster predated James Whale's 1931 film by over a century, though it's Boris Karloff whom readers tend to think of when re-visiting Mary Shelley's original. Other pop icons, like Dracula or the Wolf Man, are merely individual variations on long-known archetypes—while later, more human monsters like Norman Bates, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger have established an enormous cultural presence without transcending the films that made them famous. They are their personalities, not just their images; whereas older monsters seem to exist as pure icons, talismans of the unconsciousness. We know, without quite having to recognize on a personal level, a Dracula or a "Frankenstein" (the creature having taken on his creator's name in a kind of osmosis which The Fly would appreciate).

Likewise, perhaps, The Fly. Even if one does not know the behavior of the mutant insect-human or the plot surrounding it, one probably recognizes and shivers at the image, the idea. First crafted by George Langelaan as a short story, the narrative—losing little in translation—was first presented onscreen in the 1958 film of the same name. In the movie, a scientist builds a teleportation device but in the process of disintegrating/reintegrating him across space, a fly buzzes into the machine and the confused computer mixes up the two creatures. This results in a dreadful fly-headed human, whose inner state detoriates until finally, with his wife's help, he has himself "swatted" by a gigantic hydraulic press.

Certainly this is the version which gave the "fly and man switch body parts" concept its widespread recognition. Whether nicked for a Ninja Turtles villain or parodied on The Simpsons, the fly-headed scientist is usually derived from the '58 version. David Cronenberg's 1986 remake is a bit knottier and headier, more difficult to pin down in a simple image or idea. It is itself a riff on the earlier film, so that's no surprise—yet it has its own distinct cultural legacy, and very much its own flavor. The two Flys share similar outlooks and tap into similar anxieties, but they take the material in different directions, demonstrating its potential for various tangents as well as differences between the 50s and the 80s (culturally and cinematically), and the distinctive stamp of David Cronenberg himself.

Ironically, Cronenberg was a bit of a latecomer to the project, and the most Cronenbergian touch—the decision to focus on a gradual transformation from man to fly, rather than an instant displacement—actually predated his involvement. Following several rewrites and a tragedy involving the initial director (Robert Bierman, whose daughter died in a plane crash while he was preparing the film), Cronenberg was brought onboard. The finished film reflects his sensibility—a dark, gothic atmosphere, a focus on decay and disease, a romance between a curious, attractive young woman and an obsessive loner—but is a streamlined version of what he shot. Among the deleted scenes: the disastrous "fusion" of a baboon and an alley cat (unfortunately axed) and the vomiting-upon and devouring-of a homeless woman (fortunately so). The end result remains of a piece with Cronenberg's lower-budget early 80s work, like Scanners and Videodrome.

Aside from its central conceit, the '86 film differs quite dramatically from the '58 version. The original, starring Vincent Price and Herbert Marshall in supporting roles, with the lesser-known David Hedison and Patricia Owens as the central couple, is a bright, widescreen entry in the late 50s Cinemascope horror field. It begins where the later film ends: with Helene Delambre (Owens) having crushed Andre Delambre's (Hedison's) head and arm under a hydraulic press. She calmly confesses to the crime, refuses to admit her motive, and obsessively tries to catch a white-headed fly. Finally, Andre's brother Francois (Price) tricks her into revealing everything leading up to her husband's death—and the meaning of the white-headed fly. It turns out that just as the fly's head and arm were attached to Andre's body, so his own head and arm were attached to the housefly's. Francois and Inspector Charas (Marshall) find this story incredible, but at the last moment they discover the white-headed fly in a web, screaming "Help me! Help me!" as it is devoured by a spider. A close examination reveals that it is indeed Andre's appendages attached to the insect and Charas mercifully kills both fly and spider before, ashen-faced, agreeing not to arrest Helen for her husband's murder.

In Cronenberg's interpretation, Dr. Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), a precocious Nobel nominee who works alone, has built the teleportation devices by farming out various parts to different experts, Manhattan Project-style. He meets Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) at a party and impulsively invites her over to witness his handiwork—only to panic when she reveals she's a journalist and will take the story to her boss/ex-boyfriend Stathis Borans (John Getz—the remake has much better character names). Stathis of course finds the sci-fi conceit ludicrous, while Veronica and Seth fall in love and become lab partners-with-benefits. Eventually Seth succeeds in transporting a babboon in one piece (an earlier experiment results in a grotesquely inside-out ape) and then, drunk and jealous of Veronica's relationship with Stathis (which he's just discovered), sends himself through transportation, not noticing the fly in the works. Mayhem ensues—but slowly; at first Seth thinks he's just become an increasingly athletic, increasingly virile version of his former self.

In most ways, the remake is a much better film than the original. The storytelling is more involving (the early passages of the '58 film are largely a bore with Owens' grief/madness unconvincing and Price phoning it in; even Marshall seems bored, though his response to Helene's "Was I wrong to kill him?" is perfectly droll: "Mmmmm, who, the fly-headed man? Nooo..."). Director Kurt Neuman's staging of the original is initially plodding and dull—the limitations of early Cinemascope are apparent—and while the bright blues and greens of the whirring computer are a delight, one feels that the terror might have worked better in gothic, cramped black-and-white. The central romance seems canned and as it's a long time before the fly-man makes his appearance, the viewer may become restless with the crawling domesticity and low-rent intrigue preceding the flashback.

Yet if Cronenberg's Fly is more compelling and entertaining, the original is—at its finest moments—creepier and more gripping. It's also far more tense: while Cronenberg does not spare us gore or mutilated makeup, Neuman's camera—initially dull in its remove—becomes anxiety-inducing once Andre undergoes his transformation. We do not see our hero for a while—he slips notes under the lab door, telling his wife not to look at him, and that he cannot speak. When he finally lets her in, his hand is inside his lab coat, Napoleon-style, and his head is covered in a great black cloth. He types out notes to Helene, instructing her to hunt for the white-headed fly. The scenes in which mother, son, and maid desperately chase the insect around their kitchen is brilliantly suspenseful—it takes the everday activity of pursuing of an irritating insect, and amplifies the frustration and desperation with new meaning. The difficulty of catching flies, something we can all relate to on a mundane level, is now profoundly terrifying and even poignant—and connected, by direct plot device, to questions of mortality and the attempt to rectify personal mistakes.

When the white fly slips away, Andre gives in to his despair. Finally Helene unmasks him and the bulbous fly-head is revealed. Andre, a stiff as a human, suddenly becomes vulnerable and tragic as a man-fly. Once he furiously destroys his equipment and scratches out—his mind slipping as he does so—"Love You" on the chalkboard, he and his wife's feelings seem much more real than they did during the lame "Ozzie & Harriet" second act; refracted through sci-fi/horror tropes and the weird frisson of anthropomorphism, Andre's humanity has never been more acute. And then there's that last moment with the spider and the fly—few other shots in cinema history have been at once so ridiculous, grotesque, pathetic, and viscerally horrifying. The remake, to me at least, did not achieve such pathos until its final moments, when the Brundlefly (now far more fly than Brundle) crawls out of the teleportation device and—dragging machinelike entrails in its wake—gently points the sobbing Veronica's shotgun at its own head.

Till then, though, what The Fly does offer is endlessly compelling imagery and the tingling resonance of metaphor. Unlike Andre, Seth's physical decay is gradual—hairs sprout here and there, sores emerge on his face, his teeth fall out, his body swells and bulges, finally his face and limbs crack off leaving an insectoid exoskeleton of human size. As with Andre, Seth's mind slips too but the transformation into a ruthless, single-minded insect is articulated explicitly (Andre cannot speak once his head becomes the fly's, but Brundle is given ample opportunity to express his decline, which only underlines his overall impotence). The real-world connections here—disease, mental illness, drug addiction, are obvious. Many saw the film as an allegory for AIDS, which Cronenberg denied while welcoming the interpretation. Yet there are other 80s connections too: Seth's descent into a hedonistic, selfish animal state could be read as a condemnation of 80s greed and narcissism (surely even less intended than the AIDS reading, but resonant nonetheless). Heck, the mutation could even be interpreted as a prescient and grim harbinger of Michael Jackson's physical transformation; Goldblum's hairdo at least is a dead ringer).

The remake is indeed very much of its time, especially in relation to the original. Whereas in 1958 the Delambres were established as a blissfully wed suburban couple, Seth and Veronica are a sexier, swinging couple for a more liberated era (albeit with baggage included—Veronica has her former relationship, and the newly horny Seth brings home a tramp from a local bar). The look of the film belongs more to a post-60s—and distinctly Cronenberg—palette: urban, mechanically gothic, its teleportation hives looking like a cross between H.R. Giger and M.C. Escher. Finally, violence and gore (absent from the original) are splashed all over the remake. Andre sends a cat through teleportation in a failed experiment, and it simply fails to materialize, a meow echoing through the ether (in the original story, parts of the missing cat are eventually fused with the man-fly, at which point Andre resolves to commit suicide). Cronenberg lets the babboon materialize, all right, but a bloody paw whacking the inside of the machine lets us know PETA would not approve of the result.

Once Seth is transformed, his world becomes increasingly gruesome: he rips a hand from its wrist in an arm-wrestling contest, retches upon and disintegrates his enemy's hands and feet, and watches his own body fall to pieces. Cronenberg is fascinated not with offscreen fear (like the original) but rather explicit, unavoidable decay. Where the original Fly and other "unspoken anxiety" horror films end, Cronenberg's vision begins—starting with the physicalization of brutality and destruction, and going from there. Goldblum gives an excellent performance but ultimately the makeup and costume speaks for him—by the end, the last remnants of humanity have become all the more powerful and evocative for being so slim.

The '86 screenplay also adds a provocative twist to the tale—Veronica discovers she is pregnant with Seth's child. Whether this is the result of their initial copulation or their post-teleportation marathon sex is uncertain, and with this uncertainty grows the possibility the fetus in her womb is more insect than man (the fear is tapped into brilliantly with a hideous dream sequence in which Veronica envisions herself giving birth to a giant maggot). She comes close to aborting the pregnancy, but Seth intervenes and at film's end this plotline remains unresolved. Originally the movie was to end with another Veronica dream—this one a vision in which Veronica sees her unborn child as a butterfly. It's a pity this ending was cut, forceful as the film's existing conclusion is. It could have added one more level to this already complex film: the hidden possibility that, just maybe, the insect existence is superior to the human, and it is finally our own very human hubris and fear of the "other," which blinds us to the possibility.

Then again, such latent optimism may have compromised the film's power. In both versions of The Fly, the crucial ingredient is a central irony: by playing God, man transforms himself into the lowest of beasts, and in his final moments all the flickering embers of human consciousness can do is plead, expending one last burst of energy from the ashes of their soul, for simple extermination. (Joel Bocko, Cinema Viewfinder)