I got a number of "creature feature" collections for my birthday this year… Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, etc. I’m delving into The FlyCollection right now and just finished the “classic” Fly films… The Fly, Return of the Fly and Curse of the Fly. Virtually a treatise on diminishing returns, if I’m being completely honest.
The Fly is, of course, a classic. Released in 1958, it stars Vincent Price and David Hedison (credited as Al Hedison in the Fly, I've always remember him as the captain on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea… apparently imprinted on my young mind at the time… LOL). It’s written by James Clavell, and the talent there shows… It’s an interesting structure for a monster movie, with the bulk of the story being told in flashback about halfway through the film. Dated as it is (effects, etc.), it still holds up pretty well, especially in comparison to its sequels.
Return of the Fly is a much more standard monster movie. Price returns as the elder brother, this time caring for his nephew, the child virtually orphaned by the events in the first film. Released a year later, it’s set probably 20 years later, as the little boy is grown up and following in daddy’s footsteps (“voot-shtaps… voot-shtaps!"… I can never say footsteps without thinking of that line from Young Frankenstein). This one leans more heavily into the horror of the fly transformation, and you see the “horrifying” creature much more than you do in the first film. Frankly, where I think the Fly holds up fairly well for its era, Return is a middling entertaining film, and my one viewing is probably sufficient for this one.
Curse of the Fly came several years later (1965) and no one from the original films returns (though they do drag one of the characters from The Fly back, just not the same actor). Clearly attempting to capitalize on the success of The Fly franchise, it throws out pretty much everything from the first film, creating a new backstory that either conflates the events of the first two films, or simply ignores the Fly and picks up the Delambre family as if its story started with Return. (ALL of this is dreadfully overthinking the story, as I’m probably putting more effort into making sense of their timeline then the writers of the film did.) Interestingly, no one gets turned into a fly-brid this time, and the creatures here are just victims of a fatal flaw in the teleportation device (the thing the served as a plot device in the first two films is now the raison d’être for Curse). Overall, this one’s just a mess and likely the only reason it exists was to attempt to cash in on the previous success of the franchise. (My favorite part of this one may be the tag on the end credits, asking "IS THIS THE END?", obviously hinting at continued sequelization. Of course, this film killed any chance of that.)
This week it’s Cronenberg’s 1986 The Fly with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. I’ve always loved this one… Dani hates it, so I always get to watch it on my own. I don’t really need to see this one to know that it’s the far superior version of the story (or at least the more modernly horrific version)… but I have to see it as the Fly 2 is included in this set… a film I never even knew existed. I can’t wait to dive into that one and see how they leverage the first story for this one. I suspect it’s more diminishing returns for round 2, of course.
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