The Disc Jockey
When you tell someone that the 1986 version of The Fly is one of the best love stories ever put on film, it's fair to expect a shocked expression. For most people, what first springs to mind is one of the movie’s many notably gory moments. Get past the horror and the science, however, and at the heart of The Fly lies a tragic love story. All love is tragic to some extent; ends are a necessary step. But to watch the wounds that disease and time inflict on the ones you love is an unimaginable cruelty, even if millions of people go through it every day. That's why this film endures when mere gorefests have faded away.
Scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum, in a marvelous performance) has been experimenting with teleportation with some degree of success. Rightfully seeing this as a major scientific discovery, he encounters journalist Veronica Quaife (Davis). Scientific discovery and visceral attraction soon intertwine, and Veronica begins documenting Brundle's continued experiments. Brundle has successfully teleported inanimate objects, but his initial attempts at destroying and recreating organic matter have not ended promisingly. After adjusting his computer to better “understand the flesh,” he drunkenly teleports himself—without realizing that a common housefly was also present in the telepod. As a result, he is now no longer a man or an insect, but something new entirely.
Much of the movie’s power comes from the intense relationship (both onscreen and off) between stars Goldblum and Davis, as well as the insightful screenplay by director/co-writer David Cronenberg. It's a good time to be a Cronenberg fan. In the past couple of years we've gotten Criterion Collection editions of Naked Lunch and Videodrome, along with a great box set of his “lost film” Fast Company and his first two feature-length films, and Cronenberg's newest effort A History of Violence currently resides in the box office top 10. It's an opportune time for Fox to revisit this enduring monsterpiece, and their new two-disc set is a labor of love, comparable to the time and effort that was put into the Alien box set from two years back.
The image is devoid of excessive processing and reflects the color saturation of the film's celluloid prints rather than the washed-out laserdisc, cable, and VHS transfers that have plagued the film in the past. Audio is available in two varieties (Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS) as well as with French and Spanish dubs, with the muscular DTS track winning out. You don't think about how directional the sound of a fly's buzz is, but thanks to this disc's marvelous soundfield structure, you get a feel for it.
Disc One's only real special feature is a commentary track from Cronenberg, and as is usually the case with his tracks, it's sublime. Intelligent, scabrously witty, and always game for getting under the skin of his films, Cronenberg delivers a lot of information (including how he came up with the concept of the embedded reporter) and makes the entire film feel new in the process. There isn't any other director with such a facility for ideas that can examine them and discuss them in as interesting and entertaining a manner.
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Disc Two is where the heaping riches lie. Chief among which is the 130-plus minute documentary Fear of The Flesh, which covers the film's production from the early Chuck Pogue/Robert Bierman days through its landing at Mel Brooks' production company. It goes on to chronicle Cronenberg’s attachment to the project, the production itself (with great anecdotes from Davis, Goldblum and the genius effects technicians), and the film's successful release and enduring reputation.
But there’s also a precise selection of deleted and extended scenes. Most notable among these are one scene in which we find out what happened to Brundle's other baboon and another ending in which Veronica has a dream of her child. (Rather than the indelible maggot nightmare found earlier in the film, she dreams instead of a butterfly baby; it’s kind of silly, but thanks to Davis, it almost works.) There's also The Brundle Museum of History, which gets down and dirty with the development of Brundlefly's physical deterioration/transformation, and you get a poster/lobby card gallery, a heap of trailers and TV spots, and two hidden easter eggs which nasty things up nicely. With the set retailing for around $15, it's a must-have disc for fans of horror, romance, and exceptional filmmaking.