And that\u2019s so incredibly unfair.<\/span><\/p>\n Director Chris Walas — who had won an Academy Award for his special effects work on the previous film — looked at The Fly II<\/i> as an old-fashioned creature feature. The operatic approach that Cronenberg had used wasn\u2019t what Walas sought with the sequel. While he still wanted to deliver a thoughtful and effective story, he also wanted to embrace the more classical elements of the 1958 version. As he plainly states in the documentary Transformations: Looking Back at ‘The Fly II’<\/i>: \u201c[The Fly II<\/i>] is a monster movie.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The story starts with a worthy bit of follow-up from The Fly<\/i>: Veronica Quaife (Saffron Henderson, replacing Geena Davis) is giving birth to Seth Brundle\u2019s (Jeff Goldblum) baby. The company that was funding Brundle\u2019s experiments with the telepods, Bartok Industries, sees the baby as their property and decides to keep him locked up in their facilities. It\u2019s revealed that the baby, Martin (played by Eric Stoltz), has an accelerated life span due to the genetic mutations he inherited from his father, in addition to being genius-level intelligent and unstoppably curious. Of course, this leads him to discover his father\u2019s teleportation project. However, Martin wants to see if he can use the telepods to remove the aberrant DNA in his body to stop himself from growing up so fast. Naturally, some goopy metamorphosis occurs and we\u2019ve got ourselves a B-movie beast.<\/span><\/p>\n What works about The Fly II<\/i> from a story perspective is that it\u2019s not trying to imitate The Fly<\/i>. This isn\u2019t a case of sequelitis where you get the same movie in a new package. Is it less complex than The Fly<\/i>? Absolutely, but that\u2019s not an inherently bad thing. It\u2019s a matter of judging whether The Fly II<\/i> succeeds in its attempts at simplicity. And for the most part, it does.<\/span><\/p>\n Instead of The Fly<\/i>\u2019s triumvirate of morally shifting lead characters, The Fly II<\/i> creates definitive protagonists and antagonists. Martin\u2019s father figure, Anton Bartok (Lee Richardson in a pitch-perfect performance), is an outright bad guy who gets his comeuppance in the end. Martin is completely sympathetic, even when he devolves into a gloppy freakshow. His rampage at the end of the film carries a heroic overtone.<\/span><\/p>\n Speaking of Martinfly, it\u2019s amazing that film fanatics have mostly ignored The Fly II<\/i>\u2019s delightfully gruesome effects. Walas\u2019s company returned and were given a clean slate in terms of design. In truth, the icky approach in this film is closer to Walas\u2019s work in Gremlins<\/i> than The Fly<\/i>; lots of unnatural greens and vibrant reds make up the palette of Martin\u2019s transformation. The design of Martinfly is used to great effect in a number of shots where he leaps into a room or stomps down a hallway. And the unabashed gore in The Fly II<\/i> is masterful. There is a face-melt in this that is an utter joy, and a head crush that might be one of the best in cinema history. As far as base pleasures are concerned, The Fly II<\/i> is victorious.<\/span><\/p>\n But it\u2019s not only an accomplishment in a Fangoria cover sort of way. The Fly II<\/i> works as a streamlined story. The script is credited to a number of writers — genre stalwarts like Mick Garris, Frank Darabont, and Jim & Ken Wheat — and it\u2019s impressive that the movie is such a smooth narrative. The perspective rarely departs from Martin, and Stoltz imbues him with a bright naivet\u00e9 that keeps him appropriately childlike. The script even gives Martin a beloved dog (one of Bartok\u2019s laboratory test subjects) that becomes deformed by the telepods. When Martin discovers that the dog has been kept alive for years, he decides to kill it in order to end its suffering. It\u2019s a scene that absolutely works, even though it\u2019s being blatantly manipulative. The script may not be intricate, but it\u2019s certainly working at achieving the goals it sets for itself.<\/span><\/p>\n Otherwise, The Fly II<\/i> is a perfectly enjoyable drive-in treat. The fact that it has been discarded solely because of its comparative lesserness is not acceptable. The Fly II<\/i> was never going to be able to get anywhere close to the transcendent nature of its progenitor, and The Fly II<\/i> knows this. It leans into its sequel status and crafts a story framework that\u2019s just clever enough while keeping things small and intimate. It revels in the freedom to be as gross as it desires, and that\u2019s definitely in stark contrast to the weighty horror of The Fly<\/i>\u2019s effects. And though it lacks the import a lot of horror aficionados crave from studio pictures, The Fly II<\/i> is more than capable of delivering the kind of straightforward fun we often extol about horror fare from the \u201880s.<\/span><\/p>\n Thirty <\/span>years later, The Fly II<\/i> deserves the kind of love it was denied at its birth. Don\u2019t appraise it in relation to its father. Let it be its own animal \u2014 even if that animal is a Martinfly.<\/span><\/p>\n How could anyone even suggest making a sequel to The Fly? David Cronenberg\u2019s 1986 sci-fi\/horror remake of the 1958 classic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":560,"featured_media":11322,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/560"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11321\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/theflyIIbts-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/theflyiicouple-300x228.jpg\")
The only factor that never quite clicks is one that was imposed upon Walas by the studio: a romantic connection between Martin and fellow Bartok Industries employee Beth Logan (Daphne Zuniga). It\u2019s not Zuniga\u2019s fault — she does exactly what\u2019s asked of her — but it\u2019s the one copy-and-paste item from the original movie that feels tacked on.<\/span><\/p>\n
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