It was an uneventful Saturday afternoon when I decided to pop in one of the movies I watched when I was a kid – The Fly (1986). I knew the story but I had forgotten how visually horrendous it was – very commendable in my book for the feelings it evoked. Horrendous, yeah, but amazing nonetheless.Even in his earliest films, film director David Cronenberg imagined how advances in science, medicine, and technology (often a fusion of the three) migh alter human behavior. The Fly takes that fusion to a literal extreme, and while the movie exemplifies horror in the strictest sense, in actuality Cronenberg plays it like a twisted love story. Disgusting idea I know, but still, a great movie in my book.
Retaining the bare-bones premise of the 1958 B-movie original with Vincent Price, The Fly stars Jeff Goldblum as a scientist who designs a matter transporter, a means to disassemble matter in one location and reassemble it in another. Much to the dismay of his lover, Geena Davis, one night Goldblum tests the machine on himself. Something goes wrong. Goldblum’s DNA is accidentally fused with that of a common house fly, and while the genetic alteration first enhances Goldblum’s senses, it quickly results in a battle of genetic dominance between the two disparate species.
Cronenberg has never shunned visceral impact, and as Goldblum begins his transformation from human to human-fly hybrid, The Fly features a nonstop escalation of increasingly nasty special effects. I seriously cannot imagine how I was able to watch this when I was a kid – the images were so impactful that today in my late twenties I am left gagging and closing my eyes in a lot of scenes! Tough hair sprouts up in strange places. Goo oozes from every orifice. Body parts wither and fall off only to be replaced by mysterious new appendages.
As disgusting as the transformation sounds (and is), Cronenberg and his capable cast somehow infuse it with real emotion. Davis struggles with Goldblum’s gross transformation to connect with the man she once knew, while Goldblum struggles to retain his humanity as his free will is subsumed by instinct.
Alas, all of this can only end one way, as the sweet romance is destined to be squashed by fate’s fly swatter. Cronenberg therefore plays his tragedy for maximum pathos, and thanks in no small part to the chemistry of its leads and the plausibility of their against-all-odds relationship, rarely has such a stomach-churning series of events resulted in so many shed tears. And barfed up lunches.
