Horrorfest 3: The Fly (1958)

"The search for truth is the most important thing in the world. And the most dangerous."

So says the great Vincent Price, as Francois Delambre in THE FLY.

Here's another flick I always read about but never got around to seeing. Sometimes when the basic skeletons of stories are so well embedded in culture, everyone forgets how the story was told and just remembers the ending.

So, I was surprised to find that THE FLY is actually constructed as somewhat of a mystery, with a couple big reveals aside from just the twist ending, which is the famous part. The whole first half hour of the movie is just a set up with question after question, and the final hour systematically provides the answers, as if slowly revealing one card after another in a hand of poker.

There were a few other surprises for me. First, I'd only ever seen black and white stills of the film, so I had no idea it was in beautiful color. I also had no idea it was in big, epic Cinemascope, Fox's version of widescreen. It wasn't a cheap B-movie at all and was one of Fox's biggest hits of 1958.

The story centers around the mystery of why Helene Delambre (Patricia Owens) would smash her scientist husband, Andre Delambre (David Hedison) in a hydraulic press. No, he wasn't a Terminator.

As usual, the hook is in the mundane and every day: much of the suspense revolves around the attempts to capture a common housefly, and the tiny creature buzzing around the living room is something everyone can relate to.

Most of the story is told in Helene's flashback as she describes how her husband's successful experiments in teleporting objects from one side of the lab to the other gave way to a tragic accident involving a common house fly.

Aside from Vincent Price's impressive presence in the opening and the closing of the film, Patricia Owens actually ends up doing most of the heavy lifting. David Hedison only has a few lines before he's transformed into a monster, and as the monster he spends most of his time with a sheet over his head (creepy) typing messages out on a type writer and scrawling them feverishly on a chalk board in frantic attempts to communicate with his wife. So, most of the horror and suspense rests on Owens' shoulders as she has to convince the audience that this sequence of events isn't ridiculous, but actually terrible.

The monster makeup is pretty cool, and made more effective by the suspense leading up to its eventual reveal. First you get the mutated fly-hand, then eventually the head is revealed. I wonder if the DISTRICT 9 guys had this in mind? The head of the creature actually looks like a fairly accurate representation of a fly instead of a sensationalized sci-fi creature, the most creepy aspect being the constantly fluttering antennae that stand in for a mouth. The filmmakers even exploit the fly's sense of vision by showing its point of view at a crucial moment and revealing a kaleidoscope of images, all revolving.

As the movie wraps up it becomes surprisingly emotionally involving. It's interesting how the husband and wife maintain a sense of teamwork even under such extreme conditions, and how they arrive at their ghastly conclusion after exhausting all alternatives. This is not your average creature-chasing-woman flick. In this one, the creature uses all of his will power to resist his monstrous urges, and the woman stands her ground in spite of everything.