Return Of The Fly

Flying Tonight

Return Of The Fly
USA 1959 
Directed by Edward Bernds 
20th Century Fox
Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: More spoilers buzzing around.

I don’t know why Return Of The Fly has such a bad rep because, I revisited again for this blog and, honestly, I think it’s a pretty well made monster B-movie. Yes, it has a completely different approach and execution to the slightly superior The Fly (reviewed here), from the year before but, it certainly works as a sequel (asides from one ridiculous continuity error which I’ll get to in a little while) and it mostly makes good sense. 

Now Vincent Price was disappointed that this wasn’t shot in colour as the first film was and, yeah, I’d like to have seen a colour version of this for sure but, I dunno, the black and white photography on this one looks pretty good to me and doesn’t detract from the overall atmosphere... if anything, adding to it and adhering more to the style of a B-movie creature feature of the time. Price, who was just about reinvented by this and a couple of other movies as the king of horror in the US, also objected to the screenplay which was reportedly a lot different to the one he signed on for by the time it reached the shooting stage but, yeah, like I said, it’s more of a throwback to something less edgy and more fun so, I dunno, it works pretty well for me. 

We start this one fifteen years after the events of the original movie, at the funeral of the leading lady character of that film, Helen. In attendance are both Vincent Price as François and the young son of Helen from the first movie, Philippe, who has grown up to be played by a young Brett Halsey, long before his days of saxophoning up young ladies’ undercarriages with his mesmerising musical prowess (yeah, I haven’t got to that movie yet but I have it in a pile to watch for the blog fairly soon, so I’ll get there). 

Philippe is a troubled student of similar electrical experimentation obsession as his father and he naturally wants ot follow in his father’s footsteps... or tarsus steps, I guess. So he and a very shady colleague called Alan, played by David Frankham, work with a reluctant François to replicate and improve on his father’s process. However, Alan is really an alias for a shady criminal who is going to steal the secrets to sell to the highest bidder. When a police guy comes after him... due to a bunny pattern being deliberately disintegrated but not yet integrated until the following day... he kills the policeman and teleports him and reintegrates him with a combination of the bunny... so we get a little bunny with human hands and feet and a big guy with bunny hands and feet... which manages to look both horrifying and utterly silly at the same time. 

Anyway, when Alan is finally discovered by Phillipe, Alan knocks him out and shuts him in the teleportation device with, you guessed it, a fly. So there you go, one big difference from this and the first one is that, in the first, the monster was created by a careless mistake while in this one, the monster is deliberately created as a purposeful act of evil. Anyway, things go badly for everyone and the resultant fly/man hybrid Phillipe goes on a rampage to find the criminal. Long story short, because the film does have some twists and turns (this is a very simplified summary), the villain is brought to justice and the two results of the teleportation mix up are sent through again, restoring Phillippe back to his former self (oh, please!). 

And I loved it. It’s a really entertaining monster movie and, it even has a big improvement on the original... at least I think so. The design of the creature (perhaps due to some gigantism problems they are having when they are first trying to perfect the teleport) is that it has a much larger, somewhat silly but satisfying fly head design and, bizarrely, this is usually also mistakenly used in lots of books and articles as being the design from the first movie. Even action figure designs (I’m going on to ebay as soon as I’ve done writing this review to try and get hold of one) tend to use the look of the creature from this sequel as a stand in for the original. 

If I had one fault with the film, other than the side lining of the romantic interest... played by Danielle De Metz making her debut in this, to just a few scenes here and there... it’s the one big continuity plot point that sticks out like a sore thumb to me. As in, the son goes back to his father’s laboratory to get his old notes but, as we all know from the first film, those notes were destroyed by his father when in his fly state... so there’s no way they could have survived but, here they are using them.

Other than that though... and with a shout out to Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter’s wonderful score (they worked together a lot, although the first film was scored only by Sawtell), I’d say that, although Return Of The Fly is more linearly structured than that interesting first feature... dispensing with the mystery and going straight for the horror... it’s a really tight and entertaining follow up and I’d certainly defend it while recommending it to others. And now I’m off to ebay to look for the Mego action figure.