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Return Of The Fly (1959)

DVD Cover (Twentieth Century Fox)
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Overall Rating 57%
Overall Rating
Ranked #5,663
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Connections: The Fly

Fifteen years after his father's experiments with matter transmission fail, Philippe Delambre and his uncle François attempt to create a matter transmission device on their own. However, their experiments have disastrous results, turning Philippe into a horrible half-man, half-fly creature. --IMDb
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Review by Crispy
Added: July 3, 2012
Studios just love sequels, but how do you follow up a film as well received as The Fly was? Apparently, poorly.

At Helene's funeral, Phillipe, now a grown man, finally gets the true story of his father's demise from his uncle, Francois. Although the tale understandably creates a phobia of flies, it also lights a fire inside him. Phillipe is positive he can reproduce his father's machines and secure the family legacy. Taking on his friend Alan as an assistant, and extorting the funds out of Francois, he relocates outside the city to the home of Cecile, a girl he apparently has some history with, and sets up shop in the wine cellar. As the reconstruction progresses, it becomes apparent that Alan's motives aren't exactly based on the scientific achievement; plus we obviously wouldn't have a movie if the driven young man didn't inadvertently follow in his father's clawed footsteps and become a fly/man hybrid mutation.

Return of the Fly is one of those sequels where nobody could come up with a solid path to take so they just reused the plot from the first film. Just so it wasn't a total rehash, they replaced the Helene angle with some dumb cliche piece about Phillipe's partner attempting to steal his plans, complete with a shady business man. It's as shallow as everything else. The affection between Cecile and Phillipe was a particularly grave offense. It's alluded to, but I guess our writers were just too lazy to do anything substantial with it. The reused angles from the original film didn't fare any better either.

While on some levels it was nice to see the fly creature given more face time this time, the new mask looked completely ridiculous. Andre's fly head was a creepy, proportionate fusion between man and fly. Phillipe's is about three times too big; it doesn't matter how ugly you make it, there's nothing scary about a fucking bobblehead. The other half of this experiment gone wrong, the fly with Phillipe's head was just as bad. I'll concede the movie magic that put it on screen was better than last time, but the way it was used was, once again, a lazy and uninspired throwback. It literally just sat there moaning "Help me, Cecile" for ten minutes, with no context, with absolutely none of the punch that Andre's pleas had in the spider web.

It's a bit hard to get a read on our actors, since the script was so bad you can't blame them for their apathy. Still Brett Halsey and David Frankham both get a nod for at least trying to bring something to the table. Vincent Price is, course, more than acceptable, while Dan Seymour isn't nearly slimy enough. The tertiary level is completely looked over, as John Sutton and Danielle De Metz aren't given enough time to matter either way.

And so wraps up yet another watered-down rehash of a sequel. Nothing to see here. 4/10, and the next installment looks even worse. God help me.
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