Truly, the Fly has his final and most horrifying revenge on us in this, the final film in the original trilogy. Just like the other star of the previous two films, the Fly joins Vincent Price on vacation and actually sits the whole movie out! I try not to expect too much out of some of these movies, but is it really out of line to expect that in a film entitled The Curse Of The Fly, that the Fly be running around groping ingenues and choking lab assistants? Aren’t we owed scenes of some actor valiantly struggling not to tip over due to the top heavy nature of the giant fly-head mask he has to wear? At the very least, we should get some flashbacks that show the Fly in his prime, complete with that honey-combed point of view shot they used whenever they wanted to show us what the Fly was seeing. But you know what we get? A glossy 8×10!

That’s right, the Fly’s sole participation in this one is relegated to one character showing another what is obviously a publicity still from one of the previous movies! At least I don’t remember anyone in those movies standing around the lab asking the Fly to pose for a shot in between bouts of running amok. I half expected there to be an inscription on the photo saying something like: “Hey guys, good luck with the new picture. Sorry that Vincent and I are busy, but I’m sure the director of Psychomania and the writer of The Day Mars Invaded Earth can handle things just fine. Sincerely, the Fly.” Though I’m sure it probably would have actually come out something like this: “Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz. Psychomania. Bzzz. Bzzz.” And just so you don’t think I trawl these guys’ credits cherry picking only the most questionable projects they were ever involved in, I didn’t even mention that writer Harry Spaulding scripted Witchery which somehow teamed up David Hasslehoff and Linda Blair.

The movie has one of those beginnings that probably looked great on paper. A gal (Patricia) breaks out of a mental institution and runs away in her underwear while the opening credits roll. This is a good way to get us to pay attention to who the gaffer was since we’d be trying to see underneath that credit to check this broad out. However, the movie immediately botches this sure fire audience grabber by having this escaped looney running in slow motion while wearing a big baggy pair of granny panties! Well, shoot, you don’t think you’re going to get a big monster (even a second tier one like the Fly) to hang around and menace that, do you? Why don’t you just have her in a potato sack or a really butch pant suit? To the movie’s credit, it does try to get back on track by having her run around most of the rest of the movie in a skimpy white nightgown, but the image of those size 52 briefs are already seared into our brains by then.

Patricia gets picked up by Martin Delambre who is driving by and he demonstrates his quick thinking by stealing a dress from a clothesline, thus ending the threat of the mutant bloomers once and for all. Patricia feeds him some story about working for an author as if that explains why she was running around the Canadian woods in her underpants at all hours of the night. Martin, who is a brilliant research scientist, immediately accepts this explanation and marries her within the next ten days.

But Marty has his own secrets! Though he mentioned he was a doctor to his new wife, he forgot to specifically say that he was working on a teleportation project with his father and brother. It also sort of slipped his mind that his first wife Judith, was still alive and locked up in a cage on their estate, a disfigured victim of some teleportation incident gone horribly wrong. This leads to a funny scene once Patricia finds this out and acts outraged whereupon Marty reminds her that they had agreed not to talk about their pasts.

And to Marty’s credit, he didn’t hold it against her when the head of the mental institution Patty escaped from came by with a cop demanding that he return Patty to her facility. I was a bit confused as to how the mere fact that she was now married meant that she was no longer able to be committed, but that’s socialized medicine for you I guess.

Everyone’s least favorite Professor Quatermass, Brian Donlevy, plays Marty’s father Henri and is far and away the most entertaining part of the film. That’s not to say that he’s particularly good. In fact, he’s horrible and it’s obvious that he’s just a few years away from retiring from the Silver Screen, but his stiffly delivered bad dialogue complimented by the occasional strange facial expressions provoke a few laugh out loud moments. I’m specifically thinking of a scene where he gets teleported back from London to Canada and when Marty notices his chest is bandaged up, Henri matter-of-factly states that it was some radiation burns but that he’s “much better now.”

There’s also a scene where he’s telling Patty that a piano in one of the rooms probably shouldn’t be there and is out of tune because it’s so damp in the room and when she goes over to play it anyway, Henri does a double take like he just had a really large stick teleported up his butt. Henri also feels obligated to speechify in an effort to justify all the crazy stuff they’re doing to prefect the teleportation devices, saying stuff about how all scientists have to do stuff they hate and that sometimes people have to lose their lives for scientific advances. And not for one second does he ever sound like he believes what he’s saying. It’s just filler in between his increasingly demented schemes to keep the police from finding out what’s going on.

Not content with an anemic script that can’t even figure out how to work the title character into the plot, the film takes an even more pathetic turn when it involves the police for no other reason than to force some drama from the untested teleportation equipment. Without the police nosing around, Henri and Marty can test things at their leisure, but clinical trials on lab rats aren’t exactly going to pack them in at the theatres, so with the police hot on their tail, they have to hurry up and dispose of their previous failures and use the teleportation stuff themselves to effect their escape. There’s no reason for the police to be involved once they gave up on dragging Patty back to the nut hut, but the inspector in charge of that case gets information about Marty’s family history involving the Fly from an old cop who worked those cases and suddenly this new cop is all about getting search warrants and trying to find missing lab assistants.

Here’s a tip for all you aspiring screenwriters out there: just because a cop screws up his faces and announces to the local mad scientist that something’s fishy so he’s getting a search warrant doesn’t mean he can get a search warrant. There’s something called “probable cause” that is required (at least in the United States). This means that you need to have some type of reliable information that evidence of some crime is at the location that you want to search.

In this case of Crown v. Curse Of The Fly, what do we have? Two guys that used to work at the lab can’t be located by the officer. Also, Marty’s first wife Judith reportedly ran off so Marty got a Mexican divorce. That’s it. The cop has no evidence or facts that would lead him to believe anything other than what he’s told by Marty and Henri (Judith ran away and the two lab assistants were exchange students who went back to their home countries and Henri even has their addresses and communicates with them occasionally). Just because you can’t find someone I used to hang around with doesn’t mean I had anything to do with their disappearance. But the movie still uses this shortcut to get the cop inside their house and to get Marty and Henri to start disposing of all the evidence, which inevitably leads to all sorts of mishaps, escapes, and deaths.

It’s clear why this franchise died until David Cronenberg reinvented it a few decades later after watching this painfully stupid installment. No Fly, a collection of actors who were either on the wane or never going anywhere, and a story that was so unimaginative you realized how impressive it is that the various incarnations of Star Trek were able to do as many “transporter malfunction” episodes as they did.

And really, it was the little touches of dumbness that stood out for me more than the generally bland main story. Like when Henri gets himself teleported back from London to Canada even though it may not be entirely safe because when he had first teleported to London, he didn’t have his passport and now the London authorities were sniffing around and how was he going to explain how he got into the country without it?

Then, at the end of the movie the big escape plan was to teleport to London. Presumably, everyone had their passports this time around. A movie that should’ve been about a giant fly-headed guy eating people turns out to involve a discussion about passports? And search warrants? And subplots about a vaguely Oriental servant devoted to Marty’s first wife trying to drive the new wife crazy who apparently was already crazy in the first place? I’ll bet if the Fly had it do all over again, he wouldn’t even have sent that picture. A deservedly forgotten sequel.

© 2008 MonsterHunter