To countdown to this year’s Halloween, Luke Owen reviews a different horror film every day of October. Next up, David Cronenberg’s adaptation of The Fly…
For the last seven days of Countdown to Halloween, we’ve been looking at remakes and re-imaginings of classic movies usually with the view of the “updated” version not quite matching up to the original (Dracula: Prince of Darkness notwithstanding). To conclude this little adventure, let us look at a movie that is the pure definition of how to a remake correctly. David Cronenberg’s 1986 body horror, The Fly.
The 1956 original might be considered campy in the 21st Century, but was very typical sci-fi fodder for the time. Looking back on it in retrospect, there isn’t anything overly ground-breaking about the movie as it really is just your standard science fiction movie of the 50s, just one with a slightly more interesting premise. This is where the genius of Cronenberg’s The Fly comes into play – he took the core idea of Kurt Neumann’s piece and took it in a totally different direction.
Rather than being a science-fiction affair, the 1986 adaptation of The Fly is a gory, violent and disturbing body horror movie that delves deep into the mind of a man who had it all, but squandered it through carelessness in a drunken rage. Much like RoboCop, it plays with the idea of a scientist trying to play God and paying for his actions. Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is a scientist plagued by travel and motion sickness who develops pods that can teleport matter from one to the other. While showing reporter Veronica (Gena Davis), he perfects his machine and even manages to drunkenly transport himself – not knowing that a simple house fly had also gone in with him. Before he knows it, Brundle starts to lose his sanity as his mind and body battles with a new hybrid creature trying to literally break free – Brundlefly.
Usually in horror movie reviews you would take the director to town for rushing through or not establishing story, character and motive before introducing your main plot point, in this case the telepods. But within the first 10 minutes of the movie, The Fly establishes who our two protagonists are, how their relationship might blossom, his reasoning for creating the machines and what the machines can do. Early pacing flies past (no pun intended) as Cronenberg gets the meat of the story he wants to tell – that of the scientist battling his own mind as well as his body. After the swift set-ups, we then spend a brilliantly agonisingly slow amount time with our heroes as this one tiny mistake ruins both of their lives. We feel every moment of his transformation, we feel his pain and – more importantly – we feel Veronica’s too. We see how this weird eccentric oddball that she fell in love with slowly loses his mind to this insect creature that is dying to get break free.
But this movie could not solely be sold on the genius of the storytelling as it needed two strong performances to carry the weight and thankfully, The Fly has that and more. Before he became a walking cliche of ‘nerdy white guy that mumbles in movies’, Jeff Goldblum gives a career best as Seth Brundle and he sells every single emotion he goes through during this horrific tragedy with such conviction and believeablity. Whether is happy, angry, sad, confused, cocky, scared, maniacal or playing up the nervous introvert talking to a pretty woman, Goldblum hits a homerun in what has to be one of the best performances of the horror genre. He is complimented perfectly by comedy actress Gena Davis who gives a sublime dramatic turn as the loving Veronica and the two together make a fantastic couple with Cronenberg’s storytelling making you as an audience yearn for them to end up fine in the end – even though you know they won’t.
A lot of what has been written above in the last few paragraphs might seem like hyperbolic statements, but The Fly is an outstanding movie and is near perfect. In fact, there is a strong argument to say that The Fly is perfect. Cronenberg and his actors don’t take a step wrong, the practical effects are incredible and the story is beautifully told with a poetic genius. Not only is The Fly a brilliant movie, it’s also the best example of how to get a remake right.
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published October 15, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.
