The Fly (1986)

 

Fluen

With David Cronenberg at the helm, you know you have entered the land of body horror movies, and there is probably none more iconic than “The Fly”. The transformation from man to... something unspeakable... aborted my earlier attempts at watching this back in the nineties, so while I have watched the first part a few times, this was a first for completing it.

Ronnie Quaile (Geena Davis), a journalist, and Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) meet at a social event. Seth is socially awkward but keen to make an impression on the pretty journalist, so he invites her home to his lab/apartment to show her his invention: Two teleportation pods.

They fall in love, and she documents his progress getting the machines to work on living things, something that has in the past not worked so well. Just at the machine is ready Seth is overcome with jealously and alcohol when Ronnie goes to see her former boyfriend/boss. He decides to test the telepods on himself... and is successful. Except, he was not alone in the pod. A fly had entered the pod and merged with him upon recreation.

While Seth is at first feeling invigorated, the fly part of him eventually starts to manifest itself and Seth is turning into an entirely new creature, a Brundlefly. Needless to say, this causes some strain on the relationship between Seth and Ronnie.

This is a movie with a lot of flaws in the plot and the script. There were several times where I was wondering how many times they read through the script before starting filming. How exactly was it that Davis’ character developed so solid a relationship with Goldblum’s character in so short a time that she kept coming back to him as he was transformed at the risk of her life? How was it that teaching the computer about the poetry of flesh would stop it turning living things inside out? Or what about the million microbial lifeforms also riding along with human beings? Should they not be fused into the primary creature as well?

All this is sort of irrelevant because this is not why you watch “The Fly”. You see it because Jeff Goldblum is turning into some strange fusion of human and fly and that is done with emphasis on all the gory details. I cannot think of a more explicit and scary transformation in movie history, though my experience on body horror is a bit limited, and it is all done without CGI. Even those early phases where weird hairs start to grow from his back or he is experiencing these strange bursts of energy and strength, are scary. But it gets so much worse. Things coming out of his nails, his ears are coming off, he vomits acids to digest food externally before sucking it in and all the while his behaviour is getting increasingly excentric.

Even today, this was a tough ride for me. This is disgusting and fascinating in equal measure, a slowly unfolding disaster, a nightmare playing out right before our eyes. “The Fly” won the Academy Award for Best Makeup and that was one of most deserved wins in the history of the awards.

The rest of the movie has a nice wrapping too. Davis and Goldblum are excellent actors who gets the most out of a mediocre script (they were a couple at the time) and Howard Shore did a nice soundtrack. It just does not change that the one thing you think about when they movie is done is that horrid creature Seth Brundle becomes. For this, “The Fly” is movie history and this is classic David Cronenberg.

It is also why this is a must-see movie, but not right after dinner. Not if you like to keep your meal on the inside.