Harefooted Halloween: The Fly II

What I Liked: Some of the plot ideas are interesting like picking up the story with Seth Brundle’s kid, Martin (Eric Stoltz (Anaconda, Pulp Fiction)), who’s infected with some fly genes.  He grows up to become a giant humanoid fly naturally without having to be fucked up by the teleporter.  He’s kept as a lab experiment in a giant test facility which feeds into a whole evil corporation movie message.

The fly creature looks fantastic and really imposing.  It’s interesting that they decided to come up with an entirely new design from the first film.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense considering it’s the same family line and nothing different was done to Martin to bring the change on but whatever, it’s gnarly looking.  The creature tends to move stiffly though as I’m sure it needed a lot of puppeteers and technicians to make it operate.  But the filmmakers do their best with different angles, obstructions and editing to bring this monster to life.

If there’s one thing I always remembered about this picture it was the nasty deaths that befall several henchmen.  One poor bastard gets his face melted by fly juice.  The creature spits this white liquid on him and as his face melts he starts tearing it off making it even more horrific.  Think the face melting scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark but meatier giving it a more gruesome effect. 

Another guy gets his head crushed by a descending elevator.  It’s so goddamn liquid-y like cracking an egg.  Jeez.

What I Didn’t Like: While some ideas for the story were good there were others that weren’t.  Having almost the whole movie take place in a corporate lab facility gets tiresome and that could be mainly due to the extremely lacking production design (except for the creature).  Just about everything is so dull to look at.  There isn’t any real style to this giant multi-level space that ninety percent of the movie takes place in.  You would think there would be extra attention spent on shit like the color pallet, crazy looking lab equipment and architecture to make them fairly visually stimulating since you’re going to spend so much time with it.

There’s this one dog that gets turned into a mutated creature when they test the teleporter on it and at first I don’t have a problem with this because they’re establishing that the machine doesn’t work properly yet.  But then they bring this dog-like thing back later in the movie and it’s so incredibly sad because they keep it chained up in a deep dark pit and feed it gruel and holy shit guys.  I found this part of the movie kind of upsetting actually because this fuckin’ dog never hurt anybody.  Well except for the first lab guy that checked the pod after the botched teleportation and got his fingers bitten off.  But if you turned into a disfigured mess you’d be a little freaked out too.  What I really don’t like about seeing the dog later is that the movie makes you watch this thing suffer and be treated very cruelly.  I understand they’re tying shit back to characters and earlier events but they should’ve found another way.      

Overall Impression: The biggest crime here is that it’s just kinda boring.  They tried to do something different instead of purely rehashing the first installment and I applaud them for that.  And while it starts out interesting things quickly become somewhat tedious and there’s a lack of drive from the main characters.

All of the special effects are well done here, especially the fly monster which I totally dig.  The filmmakers weren’t afraid to show it off either.  All too often a neat creature design will become so thoroughly blocked by bad camerawork and glossed over by bad editing that you feel gypped.  Not with this one though which helps the movie a lot.

I put this in the same category with pictures like Predator 2 and Return to Oz, sequels that have been lost to time for one reason or another and that you probably didn’t even know existed.  Unlike the two examples I listed this one is completely unnecessary to check out.  Sure the ending has a few cool things going on but it’s not enough for me to fully recommend it.  As for Cronenberg’s version, if you haven’t see it you goddamn better.