The Fly (1958)
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The Fly Movie Review
The Fly is a 1958 science fiction horror film directed by Kurt Neumann and starring Vincent Price. It’s a particularly strong genre flick.
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“Help me! Help meeee!“
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It is about a scientist who is transformed into a grotesque creature after a common house fly enters unseen into a molecular transporter he is experimenting with, resulting in his atoms being combined with those of the insect, which produces a human-fly hybrid.
Needless to say, it’s a very out there storyline, but it really works for this hybrid genre in particular. I absolutely adore the 1986 remake and I have to admit that the original is weaker, but still I expected it to be much inferior, and it really isn’t given that it’s a very good movie in its own right.
Some have said that those horror scenes are funny, but to me they aren’t. They are more creepy than funny with that final sequence being quite disturbing for the fifties. I found the practical effects actually great, and the movie aged surprisingly well given its potentially dated material.
I found the characterization serviceable, if nothing special. The wife getting to kill her husband and the framing of the ending being the beginning were both very intriguing. I loved Vincent Price of course, but it was a missed opportunity to only feature him in a supporting role and I can’t help but wonder how he would have turned out in the protagonist’s shoes.
I really disliked the pacing here. The entire first act is incredibly slow, and it gets almost to a half of its runtime before the plot really starts moving. That was problematic and distracting. It needed a more concise pace and much better direction for sure.
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But the acting’s pretty good. The score’s great. The Fly also features tremendous dialogue, and I really like the creature’s role as well as the effects. The movie is pleasantly weird, and never too weird, but offering just the right amount of goofy and creepy. The script’s actually quite good and the emotion is definitely there in the third act.
The Fly is certainly never as great as its remake is as the pacing is clunky and Vincent Price is criminally underused, but the plot is great, it features the right mix of goofy and creepy while the finale is quite disturbing too. The effects, the score and the cinematography are all very good as well. It’s a surprisingly good early sci-fi horror hybrid.
