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:

Of Tits and Zombies

The fact that I should have been born a girl is the consensus of all of my friends, or it would be if anybody agreed with it. Girls in particular get all WHATEVA when I suggest the pacate proposition. But in truth, the evidence on the subject is substantial. Consider: 1.) I am extremely sensitive (and I cry easy, too). 2.) I like sweet, cloying drinks, like Coke and Sambuca, which I've had to stop drinking because of all the people who scream faggot when I walk by with that pink shit in my hands, and conversely I dislike the most bitter and burly versions of beer (that stuff feels like throwing a hand grenade down your throat). 3.) I'm almost hairless. Even my beard grows sparsely. 4.) I love cooking. (whoops... faux pas there). 5.) And dancing. 6.) And Titanic. Fuck it. 7.) I'm more into literature and the humanities than into the sciences.

And though by this stage you're probably thinking OHMYGODHE'SGAY, I'm sorry to disappoint. Nope, I don't pack fudge. I was just given the wrong tag on the birth-processor.

So anyway, all of this dubious introduction serves one purpose only, and that's to introduce my subject-matter. In reality I wanted to write about Cameron's The Terminator, as I had some really brilliant things to say about that movie, but that article has been mooched by a film-site (I shall be linking it shortly) and you guys get STUFFED!! Instead of something really clever, you get this bullshit post summing up my thoughts-o'-the-day to avoid the blog falling into dis-use and growing jungle weeds, which would make it difficult to access again, and it would encourage gorillas to settle colonies here.

This image is about the Terminator. (No seriously, that lady is the TX from Terminator 3).

So the point I was driving at is that I now have another piece of evidence pointing to the fact that I should have been born boobied, and this is it: I don't like horror movies. I'm generally quite squeamish and seeing people slapping each other with their own livers is something that grosses me out to no end. I do make an exception for the Alien saga, but that's mainly because I grew up with it, kind of like other people with Biff, Parker and Chip or however the fuck they're called, and besides it's closer to sci-fi than horror.

Yet despite my comparative dislike of the genre, I've been pushed into watching a few of these movies as of late. Firstly, there's Chris with his blog on zombies who told me that if I watched Night of the Living Dead, he'd put all rounds on him next time we went out drinking together, so I thought, what the hell. I watched it. Remuneration will have to wait till I'm back in the rain-trench also known as England, but in the meantime, everybody and their dog is asking me – did I like it?



Uhm, so-and-so. I was relieved to find that the film is actually remarkably tame. I mean, zombie movies are usually some of the grossest shit you can imagine, but this one didn't have much more than people beating each other with their shoes, which used to happen to me all the time anyway with some of my housemates. I mean, it's a disturbing film psychologically, but they aren't tossing pints of blood around like Bavarians at the Oktoberfest for a change.

The film, for those who don't know, is the story about a young deer who grows up in the forest. As he matures, he gets to make friends with several of the other animals, acquire new skills, but one day the hunters come and he must learn to be brave like his father.

No wait, that's Bambi. What the fuck was I writing about again? Oh yeah, gruesome films. Actually I think Bambi succeeded in horrifying more children with its fucking Schindler's List finale than Night of the Living Dead ever did (there's a film for you to write about, Chris). But still. Night of the Living Dead is the story about BARBRA and another group of schlocks who barricade themselves into a house and try to survive while dead people outside are raised by an asteroid's radio-waves into cannibalism (I love how that sentence started out rational and slowly decayed into total WTF territory...). One of the film's main themes is the name BARBRA, because in the first ten minutes you hear the name BARBRA a lot (particularly for the immortal line: 'They're coming to get you BARBRA,' which particularly distresses BARBRA, presumably because she's tired of hearing her name said all the time. Like, ok I'm called BARBRA, I got it guys! This isn't a porn movie!).

Another of the film's main themes is death. Or I'm guessing, anyway. I'm not completely sure.

So anyway, to be serious for five seconds, the film is actually pretty good, if a bit rudimentary in its execution. It's got quite a few psychological layers which make it engaging, it was undisputably influential, and astonishingly, it has a black protagonist (1968? Jesus!). The story is good, but I think the technique and direction, with all its close-ups on faces and screeching music, sort of underlining for us 'This is when you have to be scared guys,' feels a little dated. So it's obviously a good movie, but one that has suffered aging more so than many other films of the time. The undead, for instance, are not very credible. You just can't get out of the sense that, eh, they're frigging actors! What are all these people panicking about??


The soundtrack is also a very famous feature of the film. This monotone, hysterical piano is one of the most distinct and recognizable aspects of Night of the Living Dead, and it was particularly successful in the subsequent concert that toured all of America, called Night of the Dead Live (sorry. I couldn't resist that). It was followed by numerous sequels, some of which as influential as the first: Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Afternoon of the Dead, Tea-time of the Dead, Evening of the Dead, Supper of the Dead, Clubbing with the Dead, Drunk-Driving with the Dead, Laid with the Dead and others. (Laid with the Dead is known in some countries as Twilight. Apparently the girl there gets in a threesome involving a wolf and a vampire... woof man, necrophilia up the ass and bestiality in the mouth and they're still wondering how this film got a PG13?).

The other horror film I saw these days that I wanted to write about... yo dude, what ho! I'm out of space! I shall discuss it in the next few days.

Stay tuned! And in the meantime, get this!