Written and directed by Edward Bernds
Based on the short story by George Langelaan
Starring Vincent Price and Brett Halsey
USA, 1959
It has taken me 16 years but I have finally followed up my Horrorfest viewing of THE FLY with its sequel, RETURN OF THE FLY. To be honest, all these years, I thought I’d already seen it and written about. Turns out I was wrong! So that makes two Vincent Price movies this year. I’m not complaining.
Brett Halsey stars as the now-grown son of the scientist in the original movie, and I must congratulate the filmmakers for refraining from calling this thing SON OF THE FLY. He’s also a scientist, hell bent on recreating and perfecting his father’s teleportation experiments, with the reluctant help of his uncle (Vincent Price, reprising his role from the first movie).
There’s an industrial espionage subplot, but the real point of this flick is to get straight to the fly action casual viewers may have complained the first one lacked. The first movie uses a lot of restraint, positioning itself as a mystery, limiting how much you see The Fly, focusing more on the horror of the situation than The Fly as a monster. It’s also in beautiful color and widescreen. This sequel is scaled down in budget, black and white, and focuses on The Fly as a monster going on a killing spree, once our main character makes the same blunder in his experiments that his father did.
So, the flick pales in comparison to the original, but it does benefit from Vincent Price’s presence in the way that I guess any movie would and if you’re looking for scenes of a man with a fly’s head killing people, you’ll be satisfied.
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