David Cronenberg touched the sky of the New Flesh with this new version of the mad doctors film classic
Kurt Neumann’s original 1958 film, based on a short story by George Langelaan, had a sensational starting point: a teleporting machine merged the bodies of a scientist and a fly that passed by, giving rise to two horrendous creatures, a man with the head and hand of a fly and a fly with the terrifying head of a person. David Cronenberg remade this concept by taking fusion one step further, in search of new meat experiences.
By 1986, the year of release of ‘The fly‘, which you can recover on Disney+, David Cronenberg had a career dedicated to exploring the limits of the physical, becoming the standard bearer of the New Flesh movement. His absolute masterpiece, ‘Videodrome’, had fused sensual excess with analog technology, and ‘The Fly’ used what he had learned there and in other films such as ‘Scanners’, ‘They Came From Inside…’ or ‘ Chromosome 3’ and injected very personal disquisitions on death, illness and the fickleness of the body into the original plot of Neumann’s film.
In this new version, the scientist is Jeff Goldblum, and also a fly enters the cabins at the time of teleportation, but what the computer that controls the cabins does It is not returning two mixed bodies, but fusing the two organisms in one. This will cause the scientist to begin to experience physical and mental changes that will endanger not only his life, but also that of his lover, a journalist played by Geena Davis.
Davis and Goldblum thus star in one of the most significant and exciting tragic love stories of 1980s genre cinema, with a final stretch full of terrifying twists. Goldblum shines as a perfect canvas of the physical changes designed by Chris Walas, and that function not only as a tremendous story of body horror, but as a metaphor for the damage that the passage of time and illnesses do to our bodies. A total masterpiece that has not aged one bit (in its day it was seen as a metaphor for AIDS, but it is not difficult to find even more transcendental parallels) and that remains one of the peaks of physical horror of the eighties.
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