More tits and Goldblum's terrible movie

Right. So the other horror film I saw, which kind of creeped me out, was The Fly, with Jeff Goldblum, by David Cronenberg (before he went all 'artistic' and started making some of the worst shit in the history of movie-making... man I had to turn this film off after half-an-hour because it made me want to drive my knee through the TV screen). (A second after posting this I realised that Mulholland Drive is actually a film by David Lynch. I got confused. What is it with Davids? Do they just all make crap films?)

You know something though? I don't really feel much like talking about The Fly. I was all jazzed up for it last time, but then I ran over the word limit, and I knew that the four readers who mistakenly stumble onto my blog when they're looking for free torrents of Twilight on the internet aren't even going to open the page if they see the entry is more than four paragraphs long. I couldn't treat the topic then.

But what can you do. I promised you guys I'd tell you about The Fly, and now I've gotta do it. Otherwise I'm going to be sent to Alcatraz. It's a federal crime not to follow up on your blog promises or something.

Before getting onto the film, though, there's another thing I need to say. I noticed that the site visits spiked to almost double the average about three minutes after I put up pics of tits on the blog. Is this a coincidence? Probably, but just to be on the safe side, here's another picture of boobs.


With the perfunctory twenty hits out of the way, let's get back to us. I didn't much like The Fly. There's a number of reasons why I didn't, and the title is already one of them. “The Fly.” I mean, it's pretty vague. What if you're listing through a catalogue in the cinema and you see a film titled “The Grasshopper” or “The Longhorn Beetle.” It doesn't sound like an engaging story at all, it sounds like a fucking BBC documentary to be aired at 3 a.m. between Blatter's presentation of the Wii Bowling World Champions and a homoerotic show of Danish Fashion. But anyway.

Another thing I didn't like is how they use the lead actor. I really quite like Jeff Goldblum, he plays one of my favourite fictional side-characters of all time, that being Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park (a rock-star mathematician who introduced me, at a tender age, to the concept of chaos theory). I liked him in The Fly as well, but around half-way through the movie they coat him with this gross make-up shit because his flesh is all rotting or something and you can barely see him anymore. Might as well have given the part to Leslie Nielsen.

(The leading lady is something slightly different... she's hot, but my God, the eighties, along with the fifites, had a unique ability for building hairstyles which demolish attraction... what ARE those curl-balls they carry on their craniums??)


Anyway this leads us to the real reason I didn't think much of this movie. It's really disgusting. I know horrors are *meant* to be sick, but Night of the Living Dead made its point without all the gut-spilling, and that's why I kind of liked it, after all. Cronenberg's film is just horrendous. Basically the plot is that this wacky scientist builds two teleportation cabins, and in the process of teleporting himself, he accidentally lets a fly in the cabin with him. So he is recomposed at the molecular level with his DNA mixed with that of the fly, and he slowly mutates into a fly-man hybrid. (This leads me to another thing I never understand about these movies, the idea of these scientists who build industrial machinery on their own. Where did he get the hundreds of pounds of steel? Who fused it for him into two capsules, and who built the circuits to connect them to each other and to the computer? Did he do that himself? So as well as a genius in molecular physics, he's also a master of electrical engineering and IT programming? Speaking of which, where did he get the hardware, and how did he reprogram it into the artificial intelligence he uses? And even if he were capable of doing it all on his own, where does he get the immense capital that all this must cost, since the apartment alone is worth several thousand a week? How much power does teleportation burn and how is his domestic circuit able to support it, and if it can't, where are the generators? At one point we see him placing an animal into the capsule for experimental teleportation, a process which of course ends with gore splatted over every wall, and it's a baboon!! A fucking baboon, for crying out loud!!! And later it turns out that he's got TWO of them!! WHERE THE FUCK DID HE GET THEM?? They don't grow on trees do they... oh wait they do grow on trees, but what I'm saying is, how on earth can he get two rare and protected central-African animals as experiment-fodder?? Teleportation doesn't work on white mice for some reason? Man, the hairstyles in this film may be from the eighties, but the sci-fi is straight out of the twenties, and it's like they're having a race at which of the two is the dumbest...).

No, Bar Refaeli doesn't have anything to do with my argument, I'm just keeping the traffic coming...

So I was saying, before this most extensive parenthesis, that the film is full of goo, guts, vomit, flesh, blood and other revolting things. And personally, that's a negative, even when the story has some interesting premises, as it does here. Maybe I haven't been desensitized enough by cinema, but this stuff disturbs me. And maybe it's a matter of personal taste to a great extent, so there's little more that can be said. In truth the question of a film's responsibility with respect to portraying violence (and the categories and qualities of that violence itself) deserves its own (very long) discussion, and since I'm virtually emptying my head of junk at the moment, I'm really not going to start on that lane now. Besides, my fuel for intelligent discussion has all been taken up for The Terminator, as I said, and for at least a few days, I'm not gonna touch anything clever with a fishing rod. (Back to Italian politics then, whoopee...)

So to end today's blog entry on a note as intelligent as that on which I started it, here's what I thought about the film: