The Fly (1986)
Average Rating: 8.2/10
Reviews Counted: 55
Fresh: 50 | Rotten: 5
David Cronenberg combines his trademark affinity for gore and horror with strongly developed characters, making The Fly a surprisingly affecting tragedy.
Average Rating: 7.7/10
Critic Reviews: 12
Fresh: 10 | Rotten: 2
David Cronenberg combines his trademark affinity for gore and horror with strongly developed characters, making The Fly a surprisingly affecting tragedy.
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Average Rating: 3.4/5
User Ratings: 86,494
Movie Info
Considered fairly gruesome in its day, the original 1958 The Fly looks like Mister Rogers' Neighborhood compared to this 1986 remake. Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis star as Seth Brundle, a self-involved research scientist, and Veronica Quaife, a science-magazine reporter. Inviting Veronica to his lab, Seth prepares to demonstrate his "telepod," which can theoretically transfer matter through space. As they grow closer over the next few weeks, she inadvertently goads Seth into experimenting with
Aug 15, 1986 Wide
Sep 5, 2000
Fox
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Cast
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Jeff Goldblum
Seth Brundle -
Geena Davis
Veronica Quaife -
John Getz
Stathis Borans -
Joy Boushel
Tawny -
Les Carlson
Dr. Cheevers -
George Chuvalo
Marky -
Michael Copeman
2nd Man in Bar -
Shawn Hewitt
Clerk -
Carol Lazare
Nurse -
David Cronenberg
Gynecologist
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All Critics (55) | Top Critics (12) | Fresh (50) | Rotten (5) | DVD (43)
What makes The Fly such a stunning piece of obsessive film making is the way Cronenberg deftly allows us to identify with his monstrous creation.
Top CriticWildly imaginative, gut-wrenchingly scarifying and profoundly primal (not to mention funny), David Cronenberg's The Fly is a movie that whacks you in the solar plexus and leaves you gasping.
What's good about the film are the strong performances and the ingenious, mostly amusing script. What's ugly, of course, is the grossness. And what's bad is the movie's inability to reconcile its good and ugly aspects.
It is a fright film, a morality play about being devoured by one's work and, most powerfully, a sad, sad love story of doomed partners.
As slimy and as grotesque as some of its special effects become, The Fly is a far superior horror film to the top-grossing film in America of late, Aliens.
The Fly seizes on our ingrained, instinctive horror of sexuality, the sense of shame that our fundamentally puritanical society can't help but teach us, and by confirming our worst fears, helps us, for a moment, to move beyond them.
Any dolt could fill a movie with sickening stuff, and there's nothing scary, funny or interesting about what Cronenberg has done. It is just tedious and insulting. Get the swatter.
A classic combination of the romantic and the macabre is about to set moviegoers abuzz the rest of the summer. It`s The Fly, a remake; but it`s accomplished with a brisk and chilling new inspiration.
Only Cronenberg can get away with working out his raw phobias on screen while being poignantly witty and repulsively entertaining at the same time.
One of the greatest, horror or otherwise.
Cronenberg's most conventional film prior to A History Of Violence, The Fly is also among the finest of his American movies.
Cronenberg's most triumphant and accessible film to date.
It left me itching for something less warped to identify with than a human fly.
Kafka would have loved it.
David Cronenberg's 1986 remake of the sci-fi schlockfest The Fly is celebrated as perhaps the most perfectly balanced of the director's pre-prestige films.
Audience Reviews for The Fly
Super Reviewer
Super Reviewer
Movies Like The Fly
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- Seth Brundle: I want to be the first insect politician.
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- Seth Brundle: You're a fucking drag, y'know that?
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- Veronica Quaife: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
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- Veronica Quaife: What does the disease want?
- Seth Brundle: It wants to turn me into something else. I think I'm becoming...Brundlefly. Don't you think that's worth a Nobel Prize or two?
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- Seth Brundle: Human teleportation, molecular decimation, breakdown, reformation, is inherently purging. It makes a man a king.
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- 2nd Man in Bar: Better watch out, he eats chocolate bars.
- Marky: Yeah, so I noticed.
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Latest News on The Fly
December 14, 2012:
David Cronenberg Talks Canceled ProjectsLooking back on the "Eastern Promises" sequel and the "sidebar" to "The Fly" that might have been.
November 19, 2011:
Fox Passes on David Cronenberg's The Fly SequelAnd in other Cronenberg sequel news, Viggo Mortensen is still attached to "Eastern Promises 2."
October 3, 2011:
David Cronenberg Talks Possible ProjectsIncluding, yes, another sequel to "The Fly."
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Foreign Titles
- La Mouche (FR)
- La mosca (ES)
