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OK, there's two movies called The Fly that I honestly could see myself watching just as easily. There's the one from the 50s starring Vincent Price with the squeaky voiced "Help me! Help me!" when he's stuck in a spiderweb one. Then there's the David Cronenberg one from the 80s. If you don't know who David Cronenberg is, there's two possible reasons for it. The first is, you aren't some snobby little film nerd who makes a point of who directed various movies. The second is that you are the sort of person who actively avoids seeing really really frelled up and unpleasant movies. How best to explain this... OK. There is a page on TVtropes called Body Horror. You've probably seen it. If not, don't go looking now because you'll be there all day. Anyway, yeah. That page sums up who David Lynch is. Both in the sense that he's all about that sort of thing, and in the sense that pretty much all of his more famous movies are mentioned. The least disturbing thing he's ever done, aside from the various relatively normal movies he's made is the stupidly spelled and capitalized eXistenZ which... honestly isn't that bad of a movie. It's the whole people playing a virtual reality videogame thing, doing a bit of the whole "are we still inside the game?" bit which, impressively enough, features a game that I actually buy as a legitimate videogame playing experience. The characters wander around talking to weirdos, solving puzzles that involve bizarre logic, and are forced to say and do stuff they don't particularly enjoy whenever they trigger a cutscene. What makes it so darn David Cronenbergish is that well, one of the cutscenes involves eating this nasty mutant lizard-bug thing and using the indigestible bits left over to construct a gun, and the fact that it's very biotechy, with the game being this blobbish thing with tentacles you insert into squicky orifices chunked out of your back connected to your spinal cord. Oh, and how someone licks their finger and pokes it around in the main character's when he gets it installed. So... yeah. Now you know why I've kinda gone out of my way to ever sit down and watch The Fly all the way through. Time for me to save you the trouble of ever having to do so yourself.
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The opening credits are pretty mellow, and look like something out of a 60s sci-fi movie, with the swirly lights and all. They also remind us that this movie stars Jeff Goldblum, one of the few actors I just can't refer to with the name of a character he famously is, because Jeff Goldblum is always just Jeff Goldblum, and his love interest, Barbara from Beetlejuice. So yeah, she's giving him a lift home, while he's busy being Jeff Goldblum. Anyway, home is a very properly mad scientisty place. Actually, it kinda reminds me of the sort of thing you have in The Sims 2 a lot starting out. Just a great big Êopen room with no wall paper or proper flooring, one couch, a piano, one desk, one chair, one desk lamp, and a couple big sciencey gismos that look like they're probably aspiration rewards. I'm sure the book case and fridge are just out of shot. Anyway, they're his teleporter pods. He decides to demonstrate how they work by having Barbara hand him something of hers. She picks a stocking, which is... a rather weird call. Anyway, teleporting her stocking across the room has a horrible side effect. When it comes out the other side, it's surrounded by dry ice! AAAAAAAHHH! The horror! Oh, right. The horror is still forthcoming. Fine. He then gets into a rather odd bit of exposition on how he doesn't actually really know how the thing works, since he outsourced development of each component to a different sub-contractor.
Anyway, turns out Barbara here was actually an undercover reporter, so she's just all "What a scoop!" and runs off. All she really had with her though was a tape recorder, so she doesn't have a whole lot to convince her boss Beardface with. Since no story is going to be written, Jeff gets to relax a bit, and resume hitting on Barbara. He explains that the big problem is, he has yet to successfully teleport anything organic. When asked what happens when he tries, the reply is "Not while we're eating." I have seen at least enough of this movie that I can tell you there's a practical demonstration later on, and yeah, that is absolutely the right answer to that question. I'd also have to point out that even a teleporter that only works on inorganic materials is pretty nice. I mean, heck, it's gotta be great for international shipping. Anyway, there's a bit with beardface turning out to be Barbara's ex that I don't much care about, then it's back to the lab to try and teleport a monkey.
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Ewwwwwww! Inside-out-monkey is still twitching and making noises! I find it rather interesting that they're using such bad arbitrary technobabble speak to explain this. "It can't handle flesh, only inanimate objects" when, you know, it's a pretty dang plausible flaw. The atomic structure of most stuff is pretty simple. Just, yeah, whole bunch of whatnot atoms in a simple shape. Organic stuff though is all these crazy long strands of carbon with bits hanging of'em just so that get all fatally scrambled up just sitting there half the time, without even trying to teleport'em around.
Next Bar asks why he's always wearing the same clothes, causing him to point out his cartoon character closet of identical suits, which somehow leads into a quick tastefully off-camera sex scene, in which Jeff gets a random computer component jammed into his back prongs first. Ow. After this they try a rather silly experiment, wherein they teleport half a steak. Seriously, they cut a hunk off a slab of steak, send it through the teleporter, cook both, and lo, the teleported steak doesn't taste as good. Comes through pretty much intact though, so I maintain that just using your teleporter to revolutionize the shipping industry is a good plan. Living stuff will get all messy, but you could probably teleport, oh, cheetos around without much problem. Now though, it's time to try another baboon. Now this one actually works, but I really find myself having to ask where he keeps getting these things. I mean, lab rats you can buy in bulk, no questions asked, but I don't think you can just get live baboons delivered no questions asked. By my reckoning, he's gone through at LEAST three of'em here too. I mean, he ruined a perfectly good monkey just demonstrating it to her. Presumably there's one he tried earlier thus knowing that was going to be the case. Plus, it's not like he's been discouraged. He'd been trying to get this whole living critters teleported thing down for a while now.
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Anyway though, Bar goes off to quit/get a restraining order taken out against her boss/make sure the story isn't printed, meanwhile Jeff gets drunk and, apologizing to telemonkey for exploding other telemonkey, he decides to hop in there himself. Right now. Before he's send the baboon off for extensive medical tests... which now that I stop and think about it would probably involve killing it, so hey, while a stupid move, he's sparing a life here. Now, I know this is going to be a big shock, but when he strips naked and gets into his telepod there, a fly manages to get into the pod with him. I'm not sure if this is going to have any sort of impact on the plot or anything, but it IS called The Fly so, hey, maybe there's some major significance to where the fly ends up getting teleported to! OK, fine, nobody has lived in a cave long enough not to know the basic plot-line from here out, but again, I question this premise. If a fly sitting on the other side of the chamber is going to get all mashed up with him to turn him into a monster, shouldn't there still be a lot of other problems cropping up? Like, oh, his right hand combining with his left lung? Stuff like that?
Anyway, the first side effect of turning into a fly is that he wakes up in the middle of the night with a sudden urge to do a gymnastics routine. Seriously. It's pretty elaborate. OK, yeah, technically first he starts growing fly-like hairs out of his computer chip wound and snatches a fly out of mid-air in his sleep, but after that, it's straight to the parallel bars! Well, the exposed pipe just kinda in the middle of his lab here, but still, his stunt double here is clearly a trained gymnast, and this goes on for a while. Honestly, it's kinda creepy. The next day he's pretty darn manic, putting waaay too much sugar in his coffee while explaining that teleporting himself must have acted kinda like pouring coffee through a filter, and is just generally a really great way to make you feel better about yourself. He tries getting Barbara to go through too, since this is like, his new thing here. She's not big on it because he's kinda crazy and has this weird hair thing going on with his back. This by the way is after like the 5th sex scene in this movie. All of these are tastefully off camera and avoid showing nudity, which is why it's weird that there's been so darn many of'em. Anyway, he gets ticked off, so he walks out to find some random floozy to be his new Teleported Woman so they can go out and fight crime or something. He also picks up a zagnut bar which I point out purely for the sake of the reference in Beetlejuice, an ends up arm-wrestling a big burly redneck guy... whose wrist he snaps off. Which is... kinda weird. I mean, if he really slammed his arm down on the table so hard that it cracked, I'd get that, but it's still vertical. This is less about his super strength and more about the redneck's muscles actually being stronger than his own bones. What a mutant freak!
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So yeah, having won a floozy via his feat of strength, they retire to his lab, where she sluts her outfit up some, and he takes another jump through the pod before relatively tasteful sex scene #6 or so. If I were doing a video review of this, I'd have to have some sort of tally going here at this point. Anyway, Random Floozy doesn't wanna teleport either, but Barbara is pretty cool with it when she comes back after taking his back hair out for analysis. I guess they have an open relationship. He's kinda got the whole drug addict thing going on though, so he freaks out at her claiming they're apparently insect hairs and something has gone wrong. He shouts "Does this look like a sick man to you!?!" before punching the nearest door to splinters... and uh, yeah. That's generally a sign that something is wrong all right. Also, now the movie starts to crank up the squickiness.
OK, he goes to the bathroom mirror, attempts to shave some of the nasty fly hairs he has growing off his face with an electric razor, which doesn't really work. I feel for you man. I have might beard hairs that a razor can't cut too. Then he picks at his fingernail... and it comes off. And blueish white goo squirts out. So NOW after freaking his girlfriend out into running away, he is getting properly freaked out, going back over the log files where his weird computer. Seriously, it starts off plausible with him looking at readouts of masses and atomic composition before and after going through, and looking at detailed scanning logs to spot the fly in there, but then he starts asking it questions through this text prompt interface, and, I just have to screen-cap this later so you can see how weird it is.
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A few days later, he calls Barbara back to explain things and apologize, and... he's really really not looking too good. Seriously though, what if there were dust inside the telepod? What if the monkey had defecated out of fear and you'd missed some of that? How did your computer know that a fly got in with you and combined it and if it had the sense to check for that, why not keep'em properly separate? Halfway through explaining this, he grabs a donut, pukes on it, apologizes for being so disgusting, his ear falls off... but the gist is "Well, I'm pretty much screwed. Let's just tell everyone I'm dying of cancer or something." So Bar runs off to talk to Beardy about it because, well, there aren't really a whole lot of characters in this movie, and she didn't even meet broken wrist redneck, or get contact info for Random Floozy.
When she gets back, Jeff is in significantly better spirits and crawling around on the ceiling. I'm pretty sure even with sticky fly hairs on your palms and feet, you still wouldn't be able to suspect 180 pounds of weight like that. He's totally back to manic mode though, and wants her to record a documentary on him turning into a hideous monster. ÊNow he's cheerily demonstrating how he has to puke on donuts to eat them going "Ready for a demonstration kids?" because he sincerely seems to believe this is appropriately educational to put on Sesame Street or something. Oh, and then Bar goes back to Beardy's house to confess how uh... yeah, you know those way too many sex scenes?She got pregnant during one of those. She begrudgingly accepts the fact that, yeah, she really needs to go have an abortion. Ready to hear about a REALLY nasty scene? I'm not sure I even want to watch this. But uh... in what turns out to be just a nightmare, when she goes to the abortion clinic she ends up giving birth to a giant bloody maggot.
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Meanwhile, back at the lab, Jeff is asking his magic computer for advice on how to minimize his fly-iness. It suggests that hey, if he jumped back into the teleporter with another human, presumably what'd come out would be only 25% fly! Then it stops listening to him because his voice isn't sounding right. See, this is why voice recognition passwords suck. Also his teeth fall out, so he sticks them in his medicine cabinet where he's keeping all the other bits that fall off him... and you know, I'm pretty sure I count at LEAST two withered rotting wangs in there, and all I see visibly missing is his ears teeth and hair. Maybe one's a finger? Nope, those all seem to be there still. He is just kind of a lumpy misshapen naked grodybag though... and wait, she STILL hasn't actually gotten her abortion yet? WTF! Your maggot nightmare didn't do the trick? Anyway, increasingly insane Jeff sees Beardy is giving her rides around and that's probably not going to go good places. Back to the abortion topic though, I'm pretty sure there's a sequel to this movie about Jeff's kid, so.... what's the deal here?
Ah. Here we go. Jeff bursts through the window of the clinic to grab her and run off, classic 50s monster love story style. He begs her to actually have it since hey, it MIGHT be normal, and thus be a nice reminder of when he wasn't a hideous disgusting freak! And, you know, much more pleasant a reminder than his ear and wang collection back in the medicine cabinet! She's pretty My Body My Choice about it though, so he drags her off to another scene. Meanwhile Beady shows up at the lab with a shotgun, pokes around the computer, and uh... yeah, it seems the plan here is to follow the computer's suggestion on the whole toss another person in front. While he's reading though, Jeff hops down off the ceiling, acid pukes on his hand, melting it to a useless stub, gives his food the same treatment, and at that point he passes out from pain as Bar, who... had to have been right there the whole time, it's kind of a one-room place finally gets around to screaming at him not to keep doing that.
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Now... I was expecting the plan here was to toss Beardy in the pod for the whole more-humanification bit, but no, he plans on tossing Barbara in. That's... all kinds of issues there. Especially when he points out she's still pregnant. So you'd get this daddy-mommy-baby-and-fly fusion monster. About then though he just kinda falls apart on her. Literally. First his jaw, then basically all his skin sloughs off. He actually looks way less grody after that though. And... then he goes ahead and shoves her in the spare pod made just for this, hops in the main one himself, starts things up, and... Beady recovers, grabs the shotgun, blasts through the cords connecting her pod to the rest of the apparatus, Jeff flips out, bashes the door on his open and starts crawling out, when it activates, and the magic computer cheerfully informs us that "Fusion of Goldblumfly and Telepod Successful." So yeah, out the door pops monstery Jeff with a fair hunk of door kind of embedded in him. It's a big ol' gooey mess. Said mess crawls over to Barbara, who is now holding the shotgun, grabs the barrel, and puts it to his head. Because apparently being a fly monster is kinda neat, but he totally doesn't wanna live as 25% human 25% fly and 50% door. She actually is pretty dang unwilling to pull the trigger, but eventually does, the screen fades to black, the credits music starts, and we get a full page to tell us before the rest of the credits start rolling that "The Fly Created and Designed by CHRIS WALAS, INC." I point this out because you'd figure such a prominent credit could be more, you know, verbose and grammatically correct.
So that's it. That's the whole movie. And seriously, apparently after all that she actually doesn't get the abortion, because there's a sequel about his son also fly-ing out. But anyway, that's the movie. Special Features on this DVD are a total lie, because there is exactly one thing in here, which is, of course, a director's commentary... you know, let me just turn this on for a bit and take a listen to the scene where he wants to fuse into a single hideous monster with his pregnant girlfriend. Surprisingly enough, this is the most boring commentary track I've ever heard. No real insight into the totally frelled up psychological issues, just... rambling about how it was hard to get Jeff Goldblum talking through his makeup and how yeah, after the main character's head gets blown off, the audience is done, so there's no point in having any sort of epilogue here. Oh, and then he totally spoils the entire plot of like, the one other movie of his I've never seen. So hey, thanks for the excuse not to go watch that next!
