Eccentric scientist Jeff Goldblum is prone to motion sickness. Hates vehicles. So he invents teleportation. But when he tests it on himself a fly gets in there with him. The machine doesn't know what to do, so it combines his DNA with that of the fly.
When I was a young fellow watching this in the theater, I thought it was a good thing he didn't have a tapeworm, but what about eyebrow mites?
I had a friend who insisted we see the movie again and again, but he refused look at some of the gross special effects. He'd cower in his seat looking away and covering his eyes. Jeff Goldblum slowly turns into a giant fly and flies vomit on things they eat.
Cronenberg denied it, but people at the time thought it was an AIDS allegory.
And then there was the OLD movie, The Fly (1958). A guy invents a teleporter. He gets in, doesn't notice there's a fly with him, and when he comes out he's half-man, half-fly. I took a class in junior high school called "Monsters" where we studied horror fiction. It was before home video, so the class was going to rent a 16mm horror film to watch. We each had to pitch in 50 cents. The teacher read us our choices so we could vote on which one to rent. He read a brief description of The Fly, and because it had a teleporter, he sneered, "That sounds like Star Trek." I had never seen the movie, but I'd seen promos for it on local TV, so I knew it was nothing like Star Trek. In my outrage, I voted for The Fly, but thanks to the teacher's comment only one other kid did, too. He probably liked Star Trek.
Available for Halloween on The Criterion Channel. I wasn't sure if I wanted to watch it after seeing it so many times 38 years ago. I remembered it pretty well, but it was okay seeing it again. The special effects my friend couldn't bear to watch weren't that awful.
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