
Doing away with the campiness of the original, this film goes from romance to drama to full-on gross-out horror and back again. Its genre-blending is both its advantage and its downfall, but it's still a visceral, entertaining movie that has plenty of eyebrow-raising ickiness to make for a great evening rental.
I'm sure you've heard the story before: Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy becomes fly, girl kills boy (whoops, spoilers). Okay, it's not actually that simple. The Fly stars Jeff ah Goldblum as Seth Brundle, a scientist working on a transporter device that can beam objects from one spot to the other Star Trek-style. Geena Davis plays the reporter who interviews him, eventually falling for him. So, the science here is questionable at best. Sure, it's difficult to give a plausible-sounding explanation for a technology that doesn't exist yet, but it would have been nice to have more to this aspect of the movie other than "I have to teach the computer to know flesh." What does that even mean?


However, the fortunate thing is that the dialogue is almost unnecessary when you get to the full-on visual gall of this movie. It actually got me to feel sick to my stomach, a feat as yet unmatched by any other film (and before you ask, no, I have not seen A Serbian Film or The Human Centipede). The actual gore and makeup aren't even that much more frightening than in your typical horror flick, but the reason The Fly is able to disgust on such a visceral level is because we actually care about Goldblum's character. I've always said that there are five genres: Horror, drama, comedy, romance, and action. Well, really, there's a sixth: Tragedy. Nobody really pays much attention to this genre nowadays, as few films are made now that fit this bill, but The Fly certainly does. A lot of this is due to the story, and even more is due to Goldblum's accessible and realistic acting. Seriously, the guy knows how to craft a character, and even better, he can deliver the slightly stilted dialogue of this movie with poise and finesse. Even while feeling sorry for him, I couldn't help but laugh every time he said "Brundlefly."
