"Your stocking has just been, teleported"
Eccentric scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) meets
journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) at a party. Attempting to impress her
he shows off his latest invention, a teleportation device. Suitably impressed
she shares the idea with her editor and ex-lover Stathis Borans (John Getz) who
thinks the whole thing is a windup. After convincing Veronica not to run a
story as the device is not yet complete the two enter into a relationship. One
night after discovering that Veronica and Stathis are ex-lovers, Brundle gets
drunk and decides to step into the machine. What he doesn’t realise is that a
fly is also in the teleporter and when he and the fly are teleported they are
merged at a molecular-genetic level. Over the coming months Brundle transforms
into a human-fly hybrid which he names ‘Brundlefly’.
The film opens with the orchestral boom of a 1950’s B-Movie
in perhaps a nod to the original film upon which it is loosely based. The film
retains very little of the original and is much more a metaphor for disease and
the process of aging than the original. In my opinion the film owes as much a
debt to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis as
it does to the 1958 version. The film
is also thematically very similar to Italian Giallo Horror, especially in its depictions of madness and
alienation.
