The Fly - Lisa's Review

I'll start this review by saying, I'm not a fan of David Cronenberg.  I did mention this previously in my review of Videodrome.  I did also state that there were a couple of his movies that I loved.   The Fly is, in my humble opinion, the best thing he's ever done.

I hark back yet again to my late pre-teens and early teens and beloved family memories of Saturday nights sat around the toploader VHS with whatever gem my dad had picked up from the local video store.  We generally ended up watching a horror movie and I very vividly remember my mums discomfort and embarrassment at some aspects of nudity and sex scenes in this movie.  Having watched it again a few times since then, I can see it is not sexually graphic at all, but it was certainly enough to leave me red-faced and have my mum reach for the remote and the FFWD button back then.

So, the movie... I will make no bones about it.  I adore this movie.  I'm a massive Jeff Goldblum fan.  Not only is he a wonderfully talented actor with an imposing presence, but he is absolutely beautiful with a voice that makes my lady parts sing!  Although he became much more attractive in later years, he is definately appealing in The Fly.  As the movie starts Jeff plays Seth Brundle, a socially awkward but immensely intelligent scientist, with a nervous tension that only comes with being an eccentric scientist.  I've always found this kind of character oddly appealing and Jeff Goldblum plays it perfectly.

The Fly (1986) - Will's Review

Not that long ago, I said that I enjoyed Cronenberg's more liner work, and The Fly is the perfect example of Cronenberg at his strange, but lucid, best.

Society - Will's Review

The Whitneys are a wealthy Beverly Hills family, their daughter, Jenny, fits right in, being part of the 'preppy' crowd. Their son Bill however, while popular, never feels that he fits in with his parents, or the circles they and his sister run with. He's often suspected that something was off, but when Jenny's ex-boyfriend plays him a recording supposedly of his sister's coming out party, he begins to learn just how different high society may be... And people helping him get close to the truth start dying.

Some time in the early 90's I bought a set of video tapes from a discount bookshop called "This is Horror: From the Archives of Stephen King's World of Horror". As best as I can tell they were cobbled together from a TV series which was made mainly to promote then recent (and in some cases, still in production) horror movies. One of the movies featured was Society, and I've been meaning to get around to seeing it ever since.

The thing is, there is a big shift in this movie 70 minutes into its 95 minute runtime, a shift in sub genre, I'll get into exactly what later (they'll be a spoiler warning, although the trailer does blow it to an extent), but all the footage on my old documentary VHS was from that final reel, and I was under the impression that this movie was wall-to-wall that genre.

Instead, for most of its runtime, it's a movie that would have bitterly disappointed my teenage self. The shift is an odd one, as I can imagine the twist being 'too much' for someone who went in blind, while being too late for someone who went in expecting it. In either case, I can see it being disappointing.

That said, a little older, I was able to appreciate the paranoid thriller that comprised the bulk of the movie, while my expectation prevented what followed from being a shock; whether this softening of the blow worked to the movies advantage is impossible to say; I'm hoping that Lisa has gone in blind, because I really want to know how well the shift works if you weren't expecting it.

Before I get to the last 20 minutes, I'd just like to mention that this movie is very much about how the rich are strange, bad, and not like us... I'm surprised this movie hasn't gained a new popularity in light of the 99% movement.

Definitely worth a look for fans of 80's movies.

MILD SPOILERS FROM HERE ON.

The genre switch it to body horror. It's hinted at a couple of times through the movie, with both Jenny and Bills love interest Clarissa being seen briefly to contort impossibly, but until the movie's final 20 minutes, these could have been Bill's imagination. My experience of the film wa, i think, somewhat changed by the cat that my "This is Horror" tape made the movie look like wall-to-wall deformed, melting and transmogrifying madness.

Ordinarily I wouldn't have mentioned it in a review, but a review would be incomplete without my mentioning the special makeup effects. They are superb, and serve as a reminder in this digital age at how much better physical effects can be for many things; I'd hate to see what the 'shunting' party would look like in CGI.