Curse Of The Fly
1958’s The Fly was a stagy, dreadfully slow horror movie whose primary draw was the sight of its main character transformed into a man with an elaborate fly mask on his head. The next sequel featured his son getting the same treatment and also stumbling round the countryside with his fly mask on, but at least the film ended with him reversing the process and living happily ever after until Part 3. These first two films actually benefitted greatly from the presence of Vincent Price as the good guy brother / uncle to the main characters, lending an aura of credibility to the proceedings that in many ways legitimized what was otherwise some grade A cheese cinema. Flash forward to 1965 and the production of this third entry in the series, not only using a low budget that couldn’t afford the services of Price this time, but despite its title, the budget here couldn’t even put out for a proper fly mask which resulted in such bad word of mouth at the time that it remained buried in obscurity for decades before its recent home video releases, with the only redeeming feature on hand being the use of several plot elements which were later revived / rehashed for 1989’s The Fly 2, the sequel to the Goldblum remake which featured Eric Stoltz as his equally mutated son. With Price having flown the coop, the only big name here is respectable British character actor Brian (Quartermass) Donlevy apparently playing the now older son from Part 2 even though he has a different first name. With the actual fly man / monster gimmick now jettisoned, the film basically asks us to emotionally invest in the next generation of the cursed family from the previous films as they continue their teleportation experiments which are referred to as being the “family dream”, but first we get to see a beautiful woman (Carole Gray) escaping from the looney bin during the opening credits, a languidly shot (for no reason) sequence that leads to Donlevy’s older son Martin (just like Stoltz’s name in Fly 2) encountering her hiding on the side of the road. Well hot damn, when a gorgeous woman like that falls right into your lap, the normal go to tactic is to immediately marry her no questions asked and take her on home to the family estate, a conflict of interest to the extreme since he is already married and his actual current wife (a failed test subject who is now a mutant) is confined to a caged area in a secret part of the estate (shades of The Dog in Fly 2), a course of action so cruel (who uses their wife as a TEST SUBJECT to even begin with??) that the viewer develops nothing but contempt and even hatred at the obviously meant to be sympathetic character of the son (not to mention his whole family) even as we are bored into a near comatose state from the general slowness of the burgeoning love story between him and his new wife (whom even though she had escaped from the looney bin, is said to be more or less harmless since she had only suffered a standard issue nervous breakdown and thus is ideal to play the damsel in distress role here) while his younger brother (situated in London) is celebrating with Daddy Donlevy because Daddy was just teleported successfully from Montreal all the way over to London, a major breakthrough all the way around while being totally unaware that his other scumbag son is now shacking up with a strange woman in their secretive place of business. Donlevy teleports back to Montreal with little to no fuss to confront the issue head on (plus he didn’t bring his passport with him to London so he had to make a hasty exit after hearing footsteps) and the whole thing descends into an awful family drama, with the two Asian servants (Burt Kwong, legendary as Kato in The Pink Panther films and an obviously Caucasian actress named Yvette Rees made up to look Oriental) caught in the middle trying to assist in the experiments, keep the house clean and look after the mutated wife along with two other failed test subjects (one of whom is just a fat guy with a panty on his head) who have a brief escape / rampage sequence that makes for the most tension filled portion of the film. But mostly, it’s just a stale science fiction drama about a conflicted family (and the half dead old detective from the first two films who had investigated the initial cases and has since become a resident expert about everything concerning the family of main characters) and their desperate effort to invent a device that would change the world forever which it eventually did when it was finally invented in the Star Trek universe as The Transporter…
2/10