Halloween Blogathon: The Fly

It’s that classic tale of boy meets girl, unless you count the girl being a crack science reporter and the boy being a semi-mad genius obsessed with teleportation.

Seth Brundle is a researcher working on how to make teleportation work.   Veronica Quaife scents a story in Seth Brundle; she follows him back to his lab and he shows her these nifty two telepods he’s been working on.  After some arguing, the two agree that Veronica can hang around and cover one of the greatest scientific achievements ever.   It soon becomes more than that, though, and Seth and Veronica’s communication problems soon cause Seth to get drunk and make a very, very bad decision.

I’d say that accidentally teleporting yourself with a common housefly is a very large problem, especially when you combine with the fly at a molecular level with a human to create Brundlefly.   Ick.

David Cronenberg remade the fly from a hokey ’50’s sci-fi flick (come on, the scientist’s head was practically pasted onto a fly’s body) into a much more modern retelling of the horrors that can be achieved through science and arguably what it means to be human.    While it’s gory, sure, Cronenberg never uses violence for violence’s sake (Rob Zombie, we’ll get to you later); instead, he uses it when necessary.   … And let’s face it, Goldblum’s transformation into the fully realized Brundlefly, with his half-fly, half-human body and all the changes he has to make to get there, is going to be gory no matter what

Creepiest moment: Has got to be, hands down, Brundle’s collection of body parts that have fallen off which he stores in his medicine cabinet.   Yuck.  Either that or Goldblum’s semi-deranged rant about taking a dip in the plasma pool.

Scariest moment: I can never, ever, ever hear about someone having a baby without picturing Geena Davis giving birth to a glo-worm.

Imagine that thing, sans the cutesy face and nightcap.   OH, THE HORROR OF IT ALL.

I love The Fly.  It’s got a lot of moments of genuine horror and suspense, as well as one of the weirdest performances Goldblum has done.      It’s definitely not one of the weirdest movies David Cronenberg has done (Oh!  David, let’s be BFF just for The Brood!) but I think, one of the best.   It’s a good fright flick that’s watchable just for the scares or if you want, for the ethical and moral questions it raises.

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Flashback: Scanners (andrew’s Choice)

Ah, andrew.   One of the glorious things about andrew is that not only do I get to chit chat about hockey (did you know I like other things outside of movies?!) with andrew, I get to chit chat about a variety of movies we both love.

One of these that popped up was Scanners.

I’m unapologetic about my crazy love for David Cronenberg.   After watching The Brood at my house with a cynical, jaded friend who spent the entirety of the movie exclaiming, “What the HELL OH MY GOD OH MY GOD” every five minutes, I have wholly embraced the nutty goodness that is Cronenberg.   Cronenberg movies are like puppies and rainbows and chocolate bars in film form for me.   After every Cronenberg movie I watch, I kinda want to hug the man and give him some flowers or something.   It shocks me how much attention Tim Burton generates for being, in essence, a “freaky auteur” when Cronenberg does it so much better, far more skillfully and relies less on the same aesthetic motifs throughout his films.  So it’s no surprise I eagerly awaited my copy of Scanners arriving to me in the mail…and of course, then Netflix experienced “shipping delays”.   Boo, Netflix!

Scanners is the story of Cameron Vale, who has become essentially a homeless freakshow who wanders the city with crazy bug eyes due to the fact that, well, he’s telepathic and telekinetic.   These kinds of people are called “scanners” and Vale’s problem is that he cannot control his scanning, especially in large groups of people.

Revok, a fellow scanner, has started an underground society of scanners who want to take over the world, and he’s far enough over the “batshit insane” line to decide that if you don’t join his fun little Tupperware party of death and destruction, you’re going to meet a rather unpleasant end.   Thus, Revok travels all over, basically getting his killing on everywhere he goes.

It’s really good not to be on this guy’s bad side, as this is what happens to you when you are (cut for extreme head-exploding goodness, for those of you who might be at work and don’t want your boss looking at a EXPLODED!HEAD! OF AWESOME!)

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