YMMV / The Fly (1986)

• Adaptation Displacement: George Langelaan's short story had its reputation usurped by the faithful 1958 film adaptation — then this version came along and displaced both, in part by being an In Name Only adaptation that spun a much more emotionally and thematically complex story and characters out of the basic premise. The Collector's Edition DVD and Blu-Ray releases do include the short story as a bonus feature.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: For such a niche subject matter built around a bunch of shameless gross-out scenes, the film was tremendously successful, and is still the top-grossing film of Cronenberg's career.
• Angst Aversion: This is one of David Cronenberg's most accessible films along with The Dead Zone, and in fact his most popular, due in part to having genuinely sympathetic characters. Even so, many viewers then and now find the sheer amount of trauma Seth undergoes, both physically and psychologically, and his ultimately tragic demise too much to take. This was why none of the epilogues tested well, as Cronenberg discusses in the book Cronenberg on Cronenberg — the denouement was so devastating that audiences couldn't accept a hopeful coda.
• Award Snub: While the film's subject matter was far too unusual, and its execution far too extreme, for the Academy Awards to take beyond the Best Makeup category, many (including Siskel & Ebert) decried the Oscars for omitting Jeff Goldblum from the Best Actor line-up. Arguments that he deserved a nomination were being made almost as soon as it was screened for critics — the second weekend's newspaper ads included a quote from People noting he had a legitimate shot at one — and 20th Century Fox rescreened the film in Los Angeles the following winter specifically to push it for awards. This might not sound unusual now, but in the mid-1980s when horror was the favorite punching bag of critics...
• Awesome Music:
  • Where there is Cronenberg, there is usually Howard Shore, and where there is Shore, there is this trope. The standout cues are the menacing "Plasma Pool" (Seth's rant to Veronica about "fear of the flesh") and the mournful "The Last Visit" (the "insect politics" monologue), both of which are reprised to wrenching effect in the denouement.
  • Though it was relegated to Background Music in the bar scene because it clashed too much with Shore's orchestral score to work as an end titles playout, Bryan Ferry's "Help Me" (which was released as a single and even got a Video Full of Film Clips) is an unnervingly lovely Sanity Slippage Song / Image Song for Seth.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: A number of viewers interpret Seth Brundle as being autistic. Much of this stems from his desire for repetition and familiarity in his life, the contrast between his difficulties with small talk and his eloquent enthusiasm in his interests and work, which virtually defines his life (and thus is easy to read as a special interest), his talent for logical thinking, his extravagant gestures, his stuttering, and his straightforwardness (to the point of being a Bad Liar). Critic Drew McWeeny noted that the film is hugely popular with autistic viewers for this reason.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory:
  • 1000 Misspent Hours makes a pretty solid case for Cronenberg's film being an allegory for HIV infection in the 1980s, following on from many critics at the time drawing such conclusions. Word of God doesn't deny this theory but intended the story as a metaphor for not just any terminal disease but the aging process in general.
  • Cronenberg, in the DVD commentary, also discusses the interpretation of Seth's transformation and degeneration as a metaphor for substance abuse, particularly cocaine, which was another hot topic in The '80s. After all, Seth initially sees only the good things about the changes happening to him once he goes through the teleporter (enhanced senses and strength, not needing to sleep), even comparing it to a drug, and refuses to listen to Veronica's concerns about his increasingly unstable personality and appearance.
  • On a more specific and blackly comic note tying into Cronenberg's intended aging metaphor, Seth's Drunk with Power phase (post-teleportation but before he realizes what's actually happening to him) can be read as a dark spoof of male puberty as he effectively becomes an overgrown teenager with bad skin, "weird hair configurations", an exponentially bigger appetite, mood swings and the like, even skulking about in a leather jacket. Unfortunately, he's also legitimately dangerous due to his Super-Strength and delusions of grandeur.
• Gateway Series: This is the movie that brought Body Horror to the multiplex masses and remains the most common entry point to David Cronenberg's body of work, both horror and non-horror films.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Seth notes early on that Bartok Industries, which finances his work, "leave[s] me alone because I'm not expensive and they know they'll end up owning [my work], whatever it is." In the sequel, it turns out they not only claim the telepods for themselves following his tragic demise but also his son at the expense of Veronica's life. (In the first broached concept for the sequel, they claimed the telepods without realizing that Seth's personality was trapped within it.)
  • The ending of The Fly II means that Seth's Evil Plan to save himself was, in fact, the right idea. His son Martin completely regains his humanity by splicing himself with Anton Bartok, though it might have helped the youth that he was 75% human as opposed to Seth's 50%. The downside is that Bartok completely loses his humanity, but Martinfly isn't portrayed as a monster for going through with it because Bartok was a straight-up villain getting what's coming to him .
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • "Stathis Borans" was an unusual character name in 1986, but in The New '10s cue the jokes from new viewers about how it sounds more suited to Game of Thrones than a 1980s horror film. It could even pass as a deliberate parody of the name "Stannis Baratheon". Even better, both works feature characters with the very odd name of "Quaithe".
  • The first and last bars of music in the film being the closing music of the opera Madame Butterfly is an example of this twice over.
    • First, David Cronenberg directed the 1993 film adaptation of M. Butterfly, which also repurposes the Verdi opera in an unusual way.
    • Second, when The Fly was adapted into an opera in 2008, the libretto was written by David Henry Hwang — who wrote M. Butterfly.
  • The movie that took over the number one position at the weekend box office from this film in late August 1986 was Stand by Me (which had opened the previous weekend in the number two position), which also spectacularly indulges in the Vomit Indiscretion Shot trope.
  • One of Cronenberg's inspirations for the character of Seth Brundle was Nobel Prize-winning scientist James Watson; one of Jeff Goldblum's first roles after this was Watson himself in the 1987 BBC TV movie Life Story (aka The Race for the Double Helix). That movie's American TV debut in September 1987 coincided with this movie's pay cable debut, even.
  • Seth brags that he owns a restaurant-quality espresso machine in the opening scene. Come The Life Aquatic, he's not the only Jeff Goldblum character to own such a machine!
  • Seth talking about becoming the first "insect politician" in light of an incident in 2020 when a fly perched on Mike Pence's head during that year's Vice Presidential debate. The internet immediately rushed in with memes about the fly being the most reasonable candidate in the room and/or demands for Jeff Goldblum to play the fly on that weekend's Saturday Night Live. (As he wasn't available due to his shooting Jurassic World Dominion overseas at the time, SNL came up with an alternative parody: Jim Carrey as Joe Biden going through the telepods and not only being merged with a fly but slowly transforming into Goldblum as he mocked the Republican party.)
  • Seth's tragic character arc from nerdy but harmless to — by accident — powerful, confident but monstrous and unstable? Several superhero movie antagonists in the decades since have had similar arcs: Selina Kyle/Catwoman in Batman Returns, Edward Nygma/The Riddler in Batman Forever, Max Dillon/Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Barbara Minerva/Cheetah in Wonder Woman 1984...even the AV Club review of Dark Phoenix drew a parallel between Jean Grey and Seth Brundle, even though her arc predates his when the comics are taken into account. (Not to mention that several of the actors who played these characters have worked with Seth's actor.)
• It Was His Sled: Seth dies at the end.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Be afraid. Be very afraid" — a late addition to the script suggested by executive producer Mel Brooks according to Cronenberg — was a case of The Catchphrase Catches On virtually immediately; Dennis Miller quoted it on Saturday Night Live in November 1986, and ALF followed suit come May '87. Kids who saw 1993's Addams Family Values likely didn't know that Wednesday was quoting this film when she dropped the line; the target audience of Tangled: The Series certainly didn't know where the title of the Season 3 episode "Be Very Afraid!" came from in 2019! Moreover, Empire magazine once argued that its use as the film's Tagline changed movie marketing forever, since it was so short, catchy, and perfect that it was instantly memorable and quotable. Marketers started following suit for other films.
  • Jeff Goldblum is watching you poop.◊
  • "Oh...that-that's disgusting."
  • “Brundlefly” has become a term for any X Meets Y setup, especially when they don’t turn out well, often in the form "Like if X and Y ended up in the Brundlefly machine".
• Moral Event Horizon: While Seth's attempt to forcibly merge himself with Veronica and her unborn child is partially the result of his mind's degeneration due to a Split-Personality Takeover and partially what he sees as a Godzilla Threshold he has no choice but to cross to retain some humanity, it is the point he becomes the monster Brundlefly in both metaphorical and literal senses.
• One True Pairing: An example of this happening on the production level — by the test screening phase, virtually no one wanted the ending specified in the shooting script in which Veronica and Stathis were a couple again because they regarded Seth and Veronica as this.
• Periphery Demographic: More than most 1980s horror films, this movie advertised mainly to men though 20th Century Fox's print ads did bring up its romantic elements, has a devoted female fanbase for several reasons: The viewpoint character is Veronica, a witty, smartly-dressed, just plain smart woman with a lot of assertiveness and agency — and the film's total sympathy throughout as she deals with the obnoxious Stathis and transforming Seth. The aversion of Good Girls Avoid Abortion is also appreciated. The central romance between her and the initially-Adorkable Seth is movingly portrayed. And due in part to a woman being the viewpoint character, there is a lot of Female Gaze in how Seth is presented prior to the more gruesome stages of his metamorphosis (making this one of the key films shaping Jeff Goldblum's image as a memetic sex symbol for several generations of fangirls, the others being Earth Girls Are Easy and Jurassic Park).
• Remade and Improved: The 1986 version of The Fly by David Cronenberg is considered better than the 1958 version due to better performances from actors like Jeff Goldblum and better special effects, and is considered a landmark film in the Body Horror genre.
• Signature Scene: The most memorable if traumatic sequence of the film hands down has to be the final of phase Seth's transformation where chunks of his body plop on the floor revealing the titular "fly" that had been mutating from within. Visual Effects of Awesome and Body Horror Nightmare Fuel in full effect. That scene alone is what likely nabbed the film the makeup Oscar.
• Squick:
  • "The Brundle Museum of Natural History", aka his medicine cabinet, which holds a collection of all of Seth's discarded human body parts.
  • Hell, just with Seth's bodily disintegration, it's not a good idea to watch this movie on a full stomach. One reason the "monkey-cat" sequence didn't make it beyond the first test screening in Toronto was because it resulted in a viewer supposedly vomiting in the theater (producer Stuart Cornfeld claims they actually made it to the bathroom in the Fear of the Flesh documentary).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Around the middle of the film, Brundlefly comes to the conclusion that the only way to return to his fully human form would be to absorb one or two more humans via the same teleportation mishap that led to his current situation. This seemed to be setting up a subplot about Brundle becoming the villain much earlier and either abducting people or luring them back to his lab somehow so he can try to use them to turn back to human. Instead this plot point disappears until the climax of the film, where Brundle only tries to do this with Veronica.
• Tough Act to Follow: This is probably the most famous 1980s horror film that was not remade in the Turn of the Millennium / The New '10s run of such films. In the above-mentioned Screen Drafts episode, Drew McWeeny attests to being one of many screenwriters and producers who took a crack at crafting a new version for Fox Searchlight, but in ten years of attempts no one could figure out what could be done with the material that Cronenberg and company hadn't already pulled off. Also, there's the issue of finding a lead actor who could escape the shadow of Jeff Goldblum's career-making performance.
• Ugly Cute: Depending on your point of view, Seth in his final Brundlefly form. For a mutated abomination, his eyes rather resemble Puppy-Dog Eyes. The trick, as Cronenberg explains in the DVD Commentary, is that Brundlefly's eyes were designed to look human rather than fly-like, taking some inspiration from Jeff Goldblum's eyes.
• Unintentional Period Piece: While there's a lot aesthetically marking it as a 1980s film — video cameras (Beta ones at that), audio and video cassettes, '80s Hair, Veronica and Stathis both being smokers, etc. — the plot wouldn't have to be changed all that much to incorporate modern technology, or even changes in journalism (i.e. the rise of online media over print). Steven Benedict's podcast suggests that the reviews from 1986-87 have become this because so many critics interpreted the film as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis or illicit drug addiction, rather than the general metaphor for aging and death that Cronenberg intended.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • The "baboon-cat" scene wound up having this reaction in the first test screening: Several people lost sympathy for Seth when he threw the baboon that was successfully transported earlier and a stray cat into the teleporter pods, fused them, and then beat the resultant, violent hybrid to death. In context it turns out to be part of his desperate attempt to find a cure for his condition, but many felt he was taking his frustrations out on the creature instead — and only Bad People Abuse Animals. It and the followup in which he goes to the roof in despair only for an insect leg to emerge from the growth on his abdomen that he pointed out to Ronnie in the Wall Crawl scene was cut from the final film in order to deliberately prevent this reaction from people and keep Seth in a tragic light. The scripted bag lady sequence never made it to the filming stage for the same reason.
  • Due to a combination of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero and Values Dissonance (see below), it's not hard to see Stathis losing a hand and foot, and almost his face, to Seth's vomit drop in the climax as a much-needed moment of Laser-Guided Karma.
• Values Dissonance: Stathis' stalking of Veronica was intended to come across as harmless and funny to audiences from the '80s, but to modern audiences it comes off as unbelievably creepy and makes it very difficult to see Stathis as redeemable at all. It could have been worse: There was more Belligerent Sexual Tension between them in the original screenplay, particularly in their confrontation over his rushing a story on the telepods into print (which has him making an Anguished Declaration of Love and her even giving him a friendly kiss before departing); this wound up diminished in the actual shoot, with the actors playing things more antagonistically, and from there the editing process. Cronenberg's screenplay ends with him and Veronica getting back together after Seth's demise, with her now carrying his child, and it was filmed along with an alternate version in which she isn't pregnant but no one in the cast and crew wanted those, since it was implausible she'd just go back to Stathis after losing Seth, her true love, even given his fall from grace. Notably, the opera adaptation pulls back on Stathis's stalking and plays what remains more seriously.
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: Veronica's surname "Quaife" is never spoken onscreen, leaving movie podcast presenters wondering how it's supposed to be pronounced three decades on. In fact, it's cwafe with a long a according to the 1986 electronic press kit. Mick Garris, who wrote the first draft of The Fly II (which gave her a larger role than she ended up with), uses this in an interview on that movie's Blu-Ray release.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The seven-stage, gradual, detail-by-detail transformation of Seth is this, culminating in the emergence of the Brundlefly in all its sickening glory via a dazzlingly shot and edited transition from Jeff Goldblum to animatronic puppets. There's a reason why the effects team is listed first in the end credits, why this took home the Best Makeup Oscar for 1986, and why it currently provides the page image for Slow Transformation.
• The Woobie:
  • Seth, poor Seth. Especially in his second major stage of mutation; Veronica is compelled to embrace him even with corrosive vomit covering his clothes and his right ear having just fallen off. The embrace is notorious for eliciting screams from audiences, as Geena Davis recalls in the Fear of the Flesh making-of documentary — noting that she does press her cheek against the spot where the ear fell off!
  • Ronnie is forced to go through her own Trauma Conga Line, starting with the fact that Stathis is stalking her for much of the film's first act. Then comes Act Two and her new boyfriend's becoming Drunk with Power and exploding at her for not wanting to be teleported, and matters just get worse as she realizes that he's sick in some way and unwilling to admit as much to the point of throwing her out. Then after a month she learns how much worse he's become — and how it's thoroughly breaking him as a person. And then she learns she's pregnant...

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