The Fly

The Fly is a mass-market, horror film masterpeice that is also a work of art.

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.

Wildly 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.

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.

Things go from bad to worse, and the climax of the film is as disgusting as it is moving.

“Romance” isn’t alway the first word that comes to mind when describing David Cronenberg’s nasty body horror nightmares, but The Fly is nothing if not a deeply loving film.

Cronenberg has layered the story with so many possible interpretations and resonances that one's head swims.

This movie is convincing, it’s emotionally raw (and it’s a horror film about people in a situation, rather than a horror film where the situation is really a metaphor for grief or whatever), and it’s so much harder to watch than I expected.