David Cronenberg remakes a B movie from the 1950s into one of his signature exercises in ickiness. The Fly seems fairly sane for awhile, offering little hint of the grotesqueries to come. Jeff Goldblum stars as Seth Brundle, a reclusive scientist on the verge of perfecting a teleportation device. The guy seems to know his stuff, but his buggy, twitchy eyes should be taken as an omen: When Brundle tries to teleport himself and a fly sneaks into the machine, the result is a human-fly hybrid. When Brundle’s body starts falling apart, Cronenberg’s visceral imagery takes over. From Rabid to Dead Ringers to Naked Lunch, Cronenberg’s movies are often about the things that happen with our bodies when the bathroom door is closed (and locked). As Brundle devolves, he oozes and gurgles and bleeds. By emphasizing such biological nastiness, Cronenberg taps into a real horror – the ugly mortality of our physical beings.
