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 "The classic thriller of an experiment gone wrong!" the top of the box screams
in all caps. A brilliant scientist is obsessed with making a device that
"transmits matter from one location to another." Initial tests are okay so he
uses a "human guinea pig" which happens to be himself. "But an ordinary
housefly makes the journey with him" and they both become "extraordinarily
changed." It's described as a "chilling story" and involves a man fighting to
save his humanity and a "desperate woman's attempt to save the man she loves." 1958, 94 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
Vincent Price plays the brother of a scientist bent on combining fly and human
to form an unstoppable super-fly! Actually, that's a bit of an exaggeration.
The scientist is only interested in transporting matter through the air from one
point to another by disintegrating it at the departure point and then
reassembling it at the destination point. But since we are all here now, you
probably realize that all did not go according to plan and that there is a fly
in the ointment (buh-buh-bang!). The first thing you'll notice is in the
opening credits. It turns out that this tale of an experiment gone awry was
penned by none other than James Clavell. I can say without hesitation that
this is the Shogun of the whole half-man, half-fly genre! The next thing you'll notice is that
everyone is the film has French names and it apparently takes place in France.
That memo never made to some of the actors as their accents are MIA when
they're stinking up the joint trying to sound like Pepe Le Pew. They have this
little twerp of a kid they call Phillipe and he shouts his lines and sounds
like a typical talentless child actor and in no way even pretends to be French
(though you really can't fault him for that, I mean he still has some pride,
right?). The movie opens up with Vinny Price's brother under an industrial
press, his head and arm pulped into unrecognizability. Vince sees this and
kind of screws up his face in one those "eww, yucky!" expressions like his
brother has cooties or something. Then he gets the call all of us fear: our
sister, confessing that she squashed her husband because he had become part man
and part fly! So Vincent calls down to his club (yes, this is one of those movies where men
have"clubs" that they hang out in and meet characters who are important to
advance the plot of the movie) and speaks to his friendly neighborhood police
inspector. Now, why a wealthy industrialist like Vince would be going to the
same club as some elderly cop is beyond me, and frankly doesn't speak well of
Vincent's social standing in Somewhere, France, but the plot demands a kindly
cop, so that's what you get. Vince and the cop go to Vince's sister's house to
find out what in tarnation she was doing making Steakum out of Dr. LeScrewup.
Well, the little lady is acting kind of crazy and searching for a fly with a
white head (I wonder...no, it couldn't be! That would be too fantastic!). So
Vince and the cop have this little confab wherein the cop tells Vince that he's
onto him and that he knows Vince is in love with his brother's wife and Vince
says something like, "you mean my dead brother's wife!" Okay, that last part didn't exactly happen, but Vince does
admit to being in love with her and thus doesn't understand why she would have
done it. "There has to be a reason she made chunky salsa out of him," he
thinks. Well, the cop and Vincent go down to the basement lab (giggle!) and
see all this equipment and its kind of wrecked and there's wiring everywhere
and the first thing I think is that this dude is going to an awful lot of
trouble just to get free HBO. I mean, they only make about eight episodes of Oz a year. Vincent, the rich industrialist that he is, is aghast that his brother
would do this with $200,000 of the best scientific equipment. They want to
pretend this is France, but then they talk about dollars. Don't they use
drachmas or barter over there or something. Atmosphere is all about detail!
Later he sees the crazy widow and she sits down with Vince and starts to tell
the tale. A tale the
filmmakers like to call...The Fly!  I was a little let down at this point because the movie actually starts getting
these wavy lines on the screen like they do on soap operas or Wayne's World
whenever they want to show us a flashback. I mean, now the tension is all
gone. We already know her husband's head and hand got smushed. We already
know that the movie is called The Fly. We already know she's looking for a fly with a white head, and we shortly
know that her husband had a white head! But, maybe it is not the destination
that is important, grasshopper, but the journey. Okay, let's see how this
doofus got himself into this mess. Dr. LeScrewup is one of those types who is
consumed by pushing the frontiers of science. This of course involves using
yourself in the experiment, because you just know nobody else would stupid
enough to do it for you. First off he uses his gizmo to teleport a bowl and is
superjacked when it comes out on the other side of the room in one piece. He
excitedly shows it off to his wife who flips it over points out that the
lettering on the bottom ("Made in Japan") has been reversed. Aint that just
like a woman? Then he tries it out on a newspaper and it is a success. I wish
he could find a way to teleport Bil Keane's Family Circus off my comics page
and into space, it's atoms scattered across the cosmos, but with science you
have to take things one step at a time. Next up for teleportation is his pet
cat, the improbably named Dondalay. After this trick, the Doctor and his wife
are minus one pet cat. But you can still hear it meow! Neat! All the
irritating things of a kitty with none of the benefits! Benefits? Then we
teleport a guinea pig and it turns out fine so the good Doc figures everything
is AOK and decides to try it out on himself. What happens next has been used as a plot for one in four Star Trek (any series) episodes: transporter malfunction! How many times did we see
this happen on Trek? You had people transported to the wrong place, wrong
time, wrong vibratory plane. You had people split into different personalities
(remember Tom Riker?), you've had people mixed up with other people, you've
even had the wrong people show up. I always thought that with as many
accidents as these gizmos seem to suffer that the Federation would had at least
formed some type of committee to examine the safety of these things. Be that
as it may, the doctor in our movie experiences a transporter malfunction that's
pretty suh-weet! It seems a common housefly was in the transporter with a
common research scientist and when they were reassembled... I won't reveal
the shocking surprise (the guy has a fly head and and a fly arm) but suffice it
to say the doctor spends a good portion of the rest of the movie with a towel
over his head and his hand in his pocket. A personal aside here, I've seen
guys like that in the park and whatever they tell you they are not talent
agents and those photos will not get you a modelling job. Since he has a fly
head, what happened to his first head? Remember the fly with the white head?
Cool! His little lady finally sees him and freaks out. She regains her wits
and devises a way to communicate with her husband. She don't speak Fly and his
head that speaks English is in a spider's web in the garden screaming for help.
The two of them communicate back and forth with him either using his good arm
to type or to write on a blackboard. The movie is pretty good portraying the
doctor's deteriorating humanity and his valiant effort to fight against it.
His fly hand tries to stop his human hand from writing to his wife, but in a
touching scene he is able to spell out in chalk that he loves her and she needs
to drop an industrial press on his prickly head. The longer he is co-mingled
with the fly the less of his human qualities he is able to retain. So it's off
to brother's warehouse next door where a comfy industrial press awaits.  So, the Fly gets squashed like the half-man, half-bug that he was and the wavy
lines appear on the screen signalling the end of the flashback. The police
captain says she's whacko, but Vincent Price has a thing for his dead brother's
wife so he thinks that maybe, there's something to it. He tries to support her
version of events by saying something like, "well, her story explains all the
facts." Uhh, yeah. I guess that whole giant mutant fly thing is probably what
happened. All appears to be lost until little Phillipe casually announces that
he saw the white-headed fly about to be eaten by a big ole spider out in the
garden. Vince and the police captain haul ass (Vince actually kind of minces)
to the garden and we see this little thing in a cocoon with a human head,
squealing "help me" while this really big brown fake looking spider descends on
it. The police captain ends the spectacle by crushing both creepy crawlies
with a big rock. He and Vince sit down and figure out how to make the whole
"crazy doctor committed suicide angle" work, completely ignoring the wife's
confession and the fact that they had already gotten a warrant from a judge to
take her away. I'm sure the police captain just wrote it off as sloppy police
work. The Fly is one of those films about the dangers of playing god and messing about with
things you shouldn't. The doctor was a decent man who was trying to invent
something to help others, not pulling stupid stunts like Dr. Frankenstein with
his "let's dig up body parts to make a creature for no apparent reason" or that
fat jerk Charles Laughton played in Island of Lost Souls where he was making his half-man, half-beasts to show up people in Europe that
he didn't like. That fact and his struggle against the encroaching insect mind
(even though he was losing his mind he made sure to tell his wife he loved her
and that for everyone's safety he must be destroyed) elevate this film above
the standard giant bug movies of the 1950s. You actually cared a little about
what was happening to him and believed his reactions to his predicament. The
wife wasn't as believable - scared into unconsciousness one instant, helping out
the now mutated husband the next like he only had a hernia or something .
Vincent Price added nothing to
the whole thing. He was kind of a sissy and was just there to listen to the
story. Things would have been much more effective if we ditched the whole
flashback crap and just told the story of the doctor and his wife from
beginning to end, then it wouldn't have seemed so rushed once the accident
took place. And what of young Phillipe? What effect does this have on him?
Well, he said he wanted to be like his daddy. Say, this DVD is a double
feature. What's this movie on the other side of the disc? Return of the Fly? Wonder what that's about...
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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