36 Days of Halloween - 1986: The Fly

Eccentric engineer/scientist Seth Brundle builds a teleportation pod with an unfortunate drawback: it can't teleport living tissue. A budding relationship with beautiful reporter leads to the insight he needs to fix the error. But when he thinks she might be falling back into the arms of her former lover, Seth gets drunk and tests the machine himself. Unfortunately, an errant fly wanders into the pod. Unbeknownst to Seth, he and the fly ar...e merged at the genetic level, and the Brundlefly is born. I *love* this movie. Jeff Goldblum is perfectly cast as the eccentric and socially awkward Brundle. Gina Davis is amazing as the plucky and slightly jaded reporter. That Guy is fantastic as the slimey and smarmy boss. What's not to love? While the relationship between Goldblum and Davis feels very *very* rushed, the transition from Brundle to Brundlefly is spot on. Cronenberg takes his time with the transformation. Brundle's deterioration is very subtle at first. The hairs are the obvious sign, but the way he twitches, his change in posture, his increased energy, and even the way his skin starts to take on a sickly sheen all start to suggest that the teleportation wasn't as successfully as he'd hoped. Obviously, the audience knows going in that he's going to become a fly, but Cronenberg smartly delays the full transformation, which makes the whole thing that much more horrible. That brief period where Seth thinks that, not only did the teleporter work, but that it made him *better* than he was before just makes his eventual realization that something has gone *horribly* wrong that much more powerful. A lot of surprisingly touching moments in a film about a giant fly-monster-man.