365 Days. 365 Films.

This is yet another film I should have watched years ago – a remake of the original 1950s version of a story about a scientists who accidentally gets genetically spliced with a house fly. Seth Brundle (Goldblum) has, for six years, been working on a teleportation device, only when he tests it out using himself as his first human subject, a fly accidentally gets into the port with him. Instead of transporting them separately, the computer merges them and as time goes by, from that day on, Brundle goes through a slow transformation into a human fly.

I cannot do a direct comparison to the 50s version here as it’s another one I have yet to see, but there is a definite air of 50s horror to it, particularly with the Frankenstein/Hunchback of Notre Dame relationship between Brundle and love interest, Veronica (Davis). The quality of the film is reminiscent of an old B-movie and initially it seems like an incredibly cheap, bad 80s film, but after a while you have to excuse the quality as it becomes apparent that it may have been deliberate in order to remind viewers of the original film, or perhaps just to make the genre and the concept fit better with an appropriate style as, sadly, this is not the kind of film that would usually have been made in the 1980s.

It is a brilliant sci-fi movie and a brilliant horror movie, and one that, when watching it, reminded me of why I initially wanted to study film at college and then at university – it encompasses everything that we all know and love from Hollywood in the Golden Years or cinema.