The Fly II
From AwardAnnals
| Film: | The Fly II |
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| Director: | Chris Walas |
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| Distributor: | 20th Century Fox |
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Reviews
Amazon.com
Chris Walas, the effects whiz who turned Jeff Goldblum into the gooey, grotesque Brundle-Fly in David Cronenberg’s The Fly makes his directorial debut in this equally icky sequel. Eric Stoltz is Brundle’s genetically diseased offspring, a boy genius brought up in an experimental laboratory by a nefarious foster father eager to see what his inevitable metamorphosis will bring. No surprise here: like father, like son. Daphne Zuniga is his sweet young girlfriend, and John Getz reprises his role from the first film as a bitter alcoholic with a very bad fake beard. This cut-rate “Son of the Fly” knockoff pales next to Cronenberg’s classic, degenerating into a gory revenge flick. Walas strains under a limited budget, and many of the more elaborate creatures (a monstrously mutated dog, the skeletal fly monster leaping about the warehouse-like lab) are rather shabby. The makeup is suitably gooey, slathered in ooze and pus, and the mayhem-filled finale is a nasty but impressive over-the-top frenzy of blood and gore climaxing in the nastiest piece of poetic justice since Freaks. The opening birth scene (with a look-alike subbing for mom Geena Davis) is an homage to Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive. —Sean Axmaker
Related works
Seth Brundle, a brilliant but eccentric scientist attempts to woo investigative journalist Veronica Quaife by offering her a scoop on his latest research in the field of matter transportation, which against all the expectations of the scientific establishment have proved successful. Up to a point. Brundle thinks he has ironed out the last problem when he successfully transports a living creature, but when he attempts to teleport himself a fly enters one of the transmission booths, and Brundle finds he is a changed man.
