The Fly

The Fly – 1986 – United States

I’ve seen The Fly several times, but somehow, I forgot how gross and graphic it is. Decades later, the gory, slimy effects in this movie are as shocking and disgusting as ever. The Fly is a remake of the 1958 movie of the same name. It tells the story of a scientist who is trying to build a teleporter and accidentally scrambles his DNA with that of a housefly. To the horror of his girlfriend, he gradually transforms into a humanoid fly. At first, he looks human, but he eats insane amounts of sugar and wants sex constantly. Soon, he changes into an extremely freaky mutant. When his insect instincts take over, his girlfriend must kill him to protect herself. She shoots him and slumps sobbing to the floor while his head forcefully explodes.

As I already said, The Fly is totally gross. As the scientist changes, he grows wiry hair all over, his skin turns brown and flaky, and his body parts fall off. There are various stages to his transformation, but all of them look horrific. Jeff Goldblum, who plays the scientist, spends most of the movie wearing disfiguring prosthetics and covered in ooze. The visceral imagery is nonstop. A baboon is turned inside out during an experiment gone wrong. A woman dreams she is giving birth to a giant maggot. The humanoid fly lives in a warehouse littered with candy wrappers and vomits acid on his food before eating it. He also vomits on a man and melts his leg off.

Director David Cronenberg is known for making surreal sci-fi movies with gory and repulsive visuals, and The Fly might be his most visually extreme effort. However, its narrative is also surprisingly compelling. The story of a person transforming into a monster and losing their humanity has been done many times, and The Fly doesn’t offer many twists on the formula, but a strong performance by Jeff Goldblum creates pathos. He is lovably awkward despite being a little condescending, and even when he becomes an insect-brained monster, it’s easy to feel bad for him.

If you’ve never seen a Cronenberg movie, The Fly is a great one to start with. The gory imagery that made him famous is here in full force, and the narrative is more coherent than his less mainstream movies. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the scene where the scientist, now partly a fly, suddenly vomits on a donut and then apologizes to his girlfriend for it.

“Be afraid. Be very afraid.” That often-quoted line comes from this movie!

Rating: 8/10 Shrunken Heads. As the scientist transforms, his teeth, nails, ears, and other body parts fall off. He keeps them in a cupboard, and in one shot of it, you can definitely see a dick in there.