Fly, The (1958)
Starring: Vincent Price, David Hedison, Patricia Owens
Director: Kurt Neumann
Synopsis: Classic 50's horror film
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

 

Stupendous yarn which, among other things, brought the superlative talents of Vincent Price into the mainstream for the first time. Even though Price isn't actually playing a specifically horror-oriented role, somehow his mere presence in this 1950s box-office sensation seemed to magnetise him towards the horror genre forever after.

The plot is either ingenious or utterly insane depending upon your point of view, but whatever the case, the film works wonderfully as a bizarre and thoroughly engrossing piece of entertainment. The story concerns David Hedison (later familiar to Bond fans as Felix Leiter), who is experimenting with a matter transportation device. When his teleportation machine malfunctions, the experiment goes disastrously wrong, leaving him with the monstrous head of a juicy bottle-green housefly and one rather unhealthy-looking human hand to complete the nightmare.

Forced to adopt a life of virtual "purdah", Hedison communicates by tapping and typing instructions to his increasingly desperate and bewildered wife. One can hardly blame her for becoming a little flustered. Bloody hell, one moment she's happily married to a brilliant scientist and the next she's sharing her home with an enormous, spectacularly bad-tempered housefly.

Hedison desperately attempts to reverse the process, but every experiment ends in failure. The only possible solution is to locate the one ordinary housefly that became fused with him during the accident. It should, in theory, be easy enough to identify—as far as flies can be identified anyway—because this particular specimen ought to be sporting a tiny human head and one equally tiny human hand!

Should they somehow manage to find the elusive insect, perhaps the two hopelessly scrambled identities can be reunited and the whole process reversed before it is too late. Naturally, things prove rather more complicated than simply going out and catching a housefly. It all sounds completely preposterous—and rest assured, it absolutely is—but therein lies much of the film's peculiar charm. This is vintage 1950s horror science fiction at its most imaginative and entertaining.

The Anniversary Edition boasts a newly remastered soundtrack which certainly enhances proceedings, particularly whenever our oversized insect friend is buzzing ominously around the house. The production itself is surprisingly lavish for its day, with handsome production values throughout. Patricia Owens is suitably overwrought as the distressed wife, eventually confronted with perhaps the most appalling decision any spouse could ever be asked to make when faced with the tragic fate of her increasingly despairing husband.

The ending, together with several of the special effects, remains genuinely startling and remarkably ahead of its time. The finale in particular is far darker and more unsettling than one might reasonably expect from the supposedly prim and proper 1950s. This original version is, of course, vastly different from David Cronenberg's magnificent reinterpretation nearly thirty years later. Yet both films succeed brilliantly on their own terms: Cronenberg's as a deeply tragic and unforgettable love story, Kurt Neumann's as an eccentric, twisted and delightfully uncategorisable slice of classic horror science fiction that still retains the power to fascinate all these decades later.