No one expected David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly to be as good as it was – and as good as it still is.
He didn’t have much to work with. 20th Century Fox’s 1950s creature feature – the one where a scientist’s improperly calibrated teleportation experiment wind ups with the poor guy swapping body parts with a housefly while Vincent Price looks on worriedly – may have spawned two sequels, but none of them is particularly good it’s just the same gimmick over and over again, with the giant fly head popping out and the compound-eye effect capturing the female lead in a multiplicity of terrified screams.
But David Cronenberg signed on, fresh from Videodrome and The Dead Zone, and he made something of it. Cronenberg has credited screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue for coming up with the remake’s most inventive tweaks – the concept of a gradual metamorphosis due to DNA fusion rather than an immediate, scientifically unlikely transformation, and the ways in which that metamorphosis first manifests itself – but the director’s own rewrite of Pogue’s script turns The Fly into a proper tragedy, layering in a disease metaphor drawn from Cronenberg’s recent experience watching his father succumb to cancer.
Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis -an actual couple when the film was made – do stellar work bright-eyed genius Seth Brundle and skeptical but charmed journalist Veronica Quaife we believe it when they fall in love, and we believe it when that love is challenged by Brundle’s horrific physical deterioration. And because we believe in the characters, we accept everything else that follows.
If you’ve never seen The Fly on a big screen, where Chris Walas and Stefan Dupuis’s makeup effects writ large and Howard Shore’s operatic score pumping pathos through the walls, you really owe it to yourself to come down to the Lightbox and check it out tomorrow (Saturday) night, when it screens at 7 pm. I’ll be introducing the screening, and I can probably come up with a few other things to say. It’s that kind of movie.
