31 Days, 31 Horror Movies: The Return of the Fly

The Return of the Fly
A few years back I did a review of the original The Fly (linky). In that review I expressed my astonishment when I discovered that the original film was in color and, indeed, a completely different film than I had expected. I'd grown up thinking the color version was the sequel to a much older black and white film. THAT film, as I'm sure you've guessed, was The Return of the Fly - a much cheaper sequel green-lit when the original had done much better at the box office than expected.

It's weird to come at this film realizing that it's a sequel, as it's inferior in most every way to the original. Not that sequels are always better than the original - I think the opposite is most often the case - but I generally expect them to at least look like they were made after the original!

"Don't worry, you'll forget all about this. And grow up in black and white!"

Still, I have fond childhood memories of this movie and I tend to place it in a group with 50's sci-fi monster movies like Them! and Tarantula, movies I love and look forward to watching again and again. So let's see if this one holds up as well.

I was going to make a joke about holding things up...

The Medium
Starz again. I had fewer streaming issues this time around, but they still occured. It was nice that Starz had a few classic horror movies, though - I feel like they're hard to come by on streaming services.

The Movie
The Return of the Fly is shot in black and white (though still in Cinemascope), has only one returning cast member (Vincent Price), and eschews the slow burn mystery for something more like a thriller or film-noir crime picture. Fox appears to have done everything it could to get out a sequel quickly, including use of existing sets from the first film. (There's a scene in Andre Delambre's lab in which his message to his wife - including the shaky "I love you" - is still visible on the chalkboard in the background. It's particularly poignant as the scene takes place after the funeral of Helene.)

Despite having been made on the cheap - roughly half the budget of the original - Return didn't skimp in one important area, the presence of Vincent Price. The first two Fly films (he declined to return for the third) really launched him into the horror genre and the films he made directly after this are among the ones he's most famous for. His part in Return is slightly beefed up from the original and he appears in more scenes. His Francois Delambre is still pretty restrained, with only a few of the extravagant mannerisms that would make him so memorable in later films.

Chewing books more than scenery.

Young Phillipe from the first film is all grown up now, and in the aftermath of his mother's death presses his uncle Francois for the real story about what happened to his father. Francois actually tells him, which seems like a bad idea. Phillipe is already pursuing his father's research, however, and all the story does is make him more determined to follow in his father's footsteps. Sans the unfortunate fly-head thing, of course. Soon the young scientist is in the basement of his inherited house, working on 'disintegration and reintegration' with a fellow scientist, Alan Hines. After a brief bout of blackmail Francois joins them.

Who would ever think Vincent Price's character would be
the least villainous in this scene?

These early laboratory scenes are great and remind me of Universal Frankenstein films - all flashing lights, electrical noises and fancy equipment. It's all 50's tech, of course - with reel-to-reel computer tapes, blocky light sequences and even dark glasses that look like those used for viewing nuclear bomb tests - but it's still got that 'mad science' feel to it. Francois even gets to voice the classic "there are some things man is not meant to know" line, just so we know what kind of film we're watching.

Phillipe scoffs at this, as any good scientist should Still, Francois is right on this. There are some things man is not meant to know. What a human being looks like with hamster hands and feet is one of those things.

There's a part of your inner calm you won't get back.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, we have a number of scenes with increasingly successful experiments in... I'm just going to say teleportation, because disintegration/reintegration is just too clumsy. The three men even get as far as putting objects and animals into a suspended state by starting the disintegration and not finishing the second part of the process. At one point they do this to a hamster...

Frankenstein's message may very well be that "man should not play at being God." The Return of the Fly's message seems to be closer to "do some damn background checks on key employees." Alan, you see, is a dirty rotten thief and is planning on selling the secret of teleportation to the highest bidder. (For some reason he's doing this via the middleman of a local mortician, but who am I to judge?) When a policeman surprises Alan stealing the plans Alan overpowers the man and temporarily 'hides' him in the teleportation machine using the same 'start the process, don't immediately finish it' system they'd used on the hamster earlier.

You can imagine how this goes. This is actually the most horrifying bit in the film. You wouldn't imagine that a man with the hands and feet of a hamster would be as disturbing as it is. The hamster with the hands of a man isn't conducive to calm nerves either. Luckily they're both disposed of fairly quickly.

Not well, but quickly.

Phillipe, being no dope (except for the whole 'doing the experiments that destroyed my family' thing) figures out what Alan is up to and confronts him. Okay, scratch that 'not a dope' thing. Alan knocks out Phillipe and stuffs him into one of the teleportation tubes. Then, because Alan is nothing if not an absolute dick, he puts a fly in the same tube. (He knows Phillipe is deathly afraid of flies, though not why.) Then uses the same suspended disintegration trick to hide Phillip. And the fly. If you've been wondering how they were going to somehow get someone to wear a giant fly head again, there's your answer.

Human dickishness instead of staggering coincidence? Yeah, I buy it.

When Phillipe is reintegrated he comes through as a half fly creature, of course. Then he escapes and goes on a rampage. The fly head design isn't as subtle this time around and is obviously heavy. I say obviously because every time the actor runs or turns quickly he's forced to brace the front of the head so it doesn't topple off his shoulders. It's unfortunately hilarious.

As is this.

Phillipe-fly takes his revenge (even on the mortician, who he didn't even know was involved), Francois and a detective try and find him (and his fly-Phillipe version) and there's a somewhat sloppy happy ending. (I really wanted a giant fly body with Phillipe's head on it, myself.) It's all pretty standard monster-movie stuff. That's not to say it's bad - it's a pretty fun monster movie - it's just not at the same level as its predecessor.

The Bottom Line
While not quite the classic horror of the first film, Return of the Fly is slightly above other paint-by-number monster movies of the era. It's better than the film it was paired with - The Alligator People - for instance. Points awarded for managing a (semi) believable reason for getting someone to be half-human, half-fly again. You can never overestimate the human ability to be a jerk.

31 Days, 31 Horror Movies Double Feature: The Abominable Doctor Phibes/Doctor Phibes Rises Again

Sometimes I want nothing more than to see Vincent Price hamming up a storm in Technicolor. This weekend was one of those times. I didn't have immediate access to the Corman Poe cycle films, so a double feature of Pit and the Pendulum and The Masque of the Red Death was out. I DO have both of the Phibes movies, however, so the theme this weekend became Vincent Price Movies With "Doctor Phibes" In The Title.

The Abominable Doctor Phibes
There is a serious dearth of films with organ playing madmen in them - especially nowadays. I love that The Abominable Doctor Phibes embraces this shtick wholeheartedly from the very first scene. The 'good' Doctor has Art Deco surroundings, a mechanical Jazz band, a lovely assistant who is well trained in interpretive dance, the violin and murder, and a taste for shiny capes and robes. And, of course, a talent for elaborate murders based on the 10 plagues of Egypt. Doctor Phibes is a super villain in a world without super heroes. I imagine he's a little lonely because of that (and, you know, that his beloved wife is dead - or mostly so, if the sequel is to be believed).

"No, I will not do 'Piano Man.' Vulnavia, please kill this man with a spoon."

There are opponents, of course - primarily in the form of Detective Trout and Sgt. Schenley of Scotland Yard. Trout does the best he can to solve the murders and bring Phibes to justice, but he's named Trout - it's just not inspiring. He also has a terrible habit of being juuust a little too late to the party - something his superiors are happy to point out. (The one time he's early to a murder it doesn't matter - the victim is killed by a bronzed unicorn head launched from a catapult. Yes. I said a bronzed unicorn head launched from a catapult. Due to the spirals of the horn they're actually forced to unscrew the poor devil from the wall...)

"On the report he was like this when we got here, right?"

The reason behind all the elaborate deaths - and the most straightforward one is packing a vintage airplane with huge rats - involves the untimely demise of Mrs. Victoria Phibes. It seems she died on the operating table and Phibes intends to visit these plagues on each person who was present in the operating room, culminating with the death of the primary surgeon, Dr. Vesalius. Actually, because the penultimate plague is "The Death of the Firstborn," Phibes actually threatens the life of Vesalius' son.

He also has time to get his dance on.

Phibes is a villain, make no mistake - many of the people who are killed had only the most tangential involvement and cannot seriously be taken as guilty of anything. A nurse's death is particularly gruesome (locusts eat her face, if you want to know) and she probably didn't do anything but swab brows and hand over instruments. Regardless, it IS Phibes we end up rooting for. In a bland and bureaucratic world Phibes is all color and passion, music and motion. He has personality - and most of the rest of the cast does not. Price just lights up the screen - even though he never actually speaks! (Phibes must talk - and eat - through a hole in his neck.)

"This? Oh, just something I picked up at Goodwill. It was 99 cents!"

The final confrontation between Vesalius and Phibes actually presages Saw in some respects - Phibes has locked Vesalius' son on an operating table that is suspended beneath a device that will drip acid on to the boys face in 10 minutes. The only way to unlock the contraption holding they boy is for Vesalius to operate on him to remove a key that Phibes has lodged next to the boys heart. Open heart surgery in 10 minutes for the life of his son.

"I just hope your hands are steadier than when you did my 'facelift' doctor."

In true melodramatic fashion Phibes saves the final curse - darkness - for himself and joins his wife in death. Or does he?

Doctor Phibes Rises Again
The success of the original Phibes movie meant that a second was rushed into production. At one point there seemed to be a concerted effort to make the Phibes films into a genuine franchise - several scripts and titles were bandied about well into the 1980's - but nothing seems to have come of it (until recently - see The Bottom Line).

The sequel takes place three years after the events of the first film, as the planets come into a grand conjunction and Phibes returns to life (this is despite his blood being replaced with embalming fluid at the end of the first film). He apparently has a plan involving an ancient Egyptian tomb, a mountain and a river - the end result of which will be the return of his beloved wife.

Though the same people are involved in the second film it's just not quite as good. Oh, Price is excellent as always - and they allowed for more inflection in his electronic voice this time around. The murders are appropriately garish and gruesome. Some of the sets are really fantastic as well. However, there's just less... heart in it. The reasons for the murders are less compelling and they're pretty damn elaborate for being mostly half-assed at the last minute. Did you know his lovely, mute assistant from the first film is named Vulnavia? You will by the end of this movie, because every time he opens his... tube, he says her name. I liked it better when she was a mysterious presence - unknown and unexplained.

It's nice to see the violin return in the same role, though.

In addition they've inexplicably re-used some actors in different roles - major roles - and it knocks you out of the flow whenever it happens.

Robert Quarry (Count Yorga himself) offers a foil almost worthy of Phibes this time around in the character of Darius Biederbeck. A man with dark secrets of his own. Unfortunately the two actors aren't on screen together until the final scenes.

"Count Yorga? Who is this Yorga you speak of?"
"But it says here on IMDB..."

 

Though the Egyptian trappings offer an interesting new location for Phibes machination and the jokes are plentiful - if overly broad this time around - the whole of the picture just never rises to the same giddy heights of the first film. The music isn't as good, the cinematography isn't as good and the story - though it has possibilities unexplored - is not quite up to snuff either. It's still a good time, it just suffers in comparison to the original.

"Years from now a show called Lost will reference this moment and no one will get it."

The Bottom Line
Way too much fun, and one of a handful of 1970's Vincent Price films I really enjoy. (These make great companion pieces to Theater of Blood, FYI.) It's obvious everyone had a great time making these - particularly the first one - and I'm a little sad they never got a chance to make any more sequels with Price.

FYI - according to rumor, Malcolm Macdowel is slated to start in a remake, Forever Phibes. While I can't image it being anywhere near as over-the-top glorious as its predecessors, I nonetheless look forward to seeing shiny robes, art deco sets, mysterious but lovely assistants and all the thunderous organ music I can stand.

Fear Flashback Friday: Last Man on Earth

Last Man on Earth

"I can't live a heartbeat away from hell - and forget it."

I read Richard Matheson's I Am Legend pretty late in my sci-fi reading history. I'd already seen and read a dozen things that were inspired by (or blatantly ripped off) the book, but it still had power, and is well worth a read if you get a chance.

While you can see its influence in things like the original Night of the Living Dead, I don't think anyone's really done the original story justice - official adaptations included. Last Man on Earth comes the closest, however. Omega Man has its own cheesy glories, but as an adaptation of the novel it fails miserably. I Am Legend was a fun movie - and in some ways captured a bit of that epic loneliness of the main character - but it's an action movie at the end of the day, more concerned with the CGI monsters and action set pieces.

I wanted to make a joke about 'getting the point' - but I got nothin'.

No, Last Man on Earth - despite the slow pacing, bad acting (except for Price) and the whole low-budget feel to the whole affair - is the most faithful. Whether that's a good thing or not is a matter of opinion. I happen to think it's the best of the bunch - with the changes from the novel being necessary (especially the ending).

The Medium
For years all I've had was a DVD copy that was a part of one of those '50 Horror Classics' type collections. It's pretty crappy, cropped on the sides and with significant dust/scratches/damage. Luckily, Scream Factory has released a Blu-ray version as part of its Vincent Price Collection II. I don't own the set yet, but it's something I hope to pick up eventually.

The picture is a revelation compared to the low-quality versions I've seen on TV and DVD. The picture is sharp and detailed and the contrast is much improved, providing a depth sorely lacking in previous releases.

The Movie
It's the end of the world and we know it. The sun rises on an empty LA. Bodies and debris litter the streets. In a residential neighborhood, in a house festooned with garlic and mirrors, the Last Man on Earth is waking up.

No crowds, but the smell...

The bleakness of Morgan's existence is made obvious early on in Last Man on Earth. The shots of various parts of LA with corpses strewn about, empty streets, debris everywhere. Then there's Morgan's house - full of just the most essential things, piled up everywhere. His living room includes a record player, but it also has a shortwave radio setup and a lathe where he makes stakes. There are what look like blood splatters on the walls. This is a man who is just surviving - and really, if you're the last person on earth, who do you have to clean up for?

Normally I dislike narration, but I'll make an exception for Vincent Price. It's really a one-man show, this movie, and he does a fantastic job - alternately stoic and on the edge of breaking down.

It's an average day for Morgan, bleak as it is. Need garlic and gas. Pile the corpses he find outside of his house into the back of his station wagon and drive them to a smoking pit where he dumps the bodies. Then it's a trip to the grocery store, past piles of corpses.

And a quick trip to the mirror store. What's good in vampire repellent these days?

At this point the rational part of your brain has questions. Generators still working, gas still available after three years? Food still neatly stacked on shelves? Corpses EVERYWHERE? In a modern movie all this stuff would be smashed, the food taken during the collapse of society - but it was a different time.

A good portion of Morgan's day is going door to door, room to room, killing what can only be described as vampires. It's gotta be vampires, right? We've got  garlic, mirrors, and stakes. Yet they look and act more like zombies. Especially once he returns home just before sundown and the creatures come out of the dark to assault his house.

I like how there's a couple of sections off the main area, like he just got bored and needed a change of scenery.

 That look on his face as they assault the house. Imagine three years of that. Gah.

The next day Morgan goes to visit his wife's crypt. One eerie detail - the cemetery is jammed with the rows of cheap, makeshift crosses. He falls asleep and by the time he wakes up the sun has already set. He's forced to run a gauntlet of the creatures to get to his car and back to the house.

Dude. They're zombies. Slow-moving, fairly weak, trouble in groups. Zombies.

Zombies or vampires, this was a stupid place to be at sundown.

This must have been one of the first post-apocalyptic movies that had all these elements. A wrecked city, a lone survivor watching films of his family, checking on the radio for survivors, slowly going mad. Vincent Price is really good in this. I mean he's good normally, but just really understated and effective here.

We eventually get a flashback to life before, when the plague was just getting started, and geez, that's an effective flashback. Here's what life was like - before your daughter was taken away to be burned by the military. Before your wife came back from the grave to try and kill you. And your best friend is the monster trying to kill you every night. We get a very good sense of how things are falling apart. And they actually the word "vampires."

Unfortunately, nobody is a good actor in this film so far except Price. It's not horrible, as most of the film is just him, but it's noticeable when any other actors have lines.

There's a bit in the flashback where the military has come and taken his daughter, who has been infected. He rushes to the pit where they're burning bodies - the same pit he's dumping at in the earlier part of the film. The military won't let him in and he wails that it's his daughter in there. The soldier's reply:  "Mister, a lot of daughters are in there. Including my own."

"We had some levity in the script, but then we ended up burning it in this pit."

That is some dark shit right there.

You know, it's small bits that stick out to me. That he doesn't clean up the sawdust from making stakes. The joy on Morgan's face when he sees the stray dog. The horror at the return of his wife. It's awesome - awful, but awesome.

Eventually Morgan finds someone else IS alive. A woman named Ruth that runs when she first sees him, though he's able to catch up to her and convince her to come with him. What's interesting (at least to me) is that he's less overjoyed at finding her than he was at finding the dog. Maybe it's the suspicion that things will all go wrong. He's right about that, and Ruth is hiding a terrible secret. One that will eventually lead to Morgan's death.

Shouldn't this be pitchforks and torches?

The ending is substantially different from the book, but it is more exciting, with a chase, a gunfight and a final confrontation in a church. There's some dialogue with Ruth about him being just as much a monster to those he's killed as they are to him, but it gets a bit muddled in the rush. (And I wish he'd called them monsters instead of 'freaks' for some reason.) There's no real representation of a new order taking the place of the old - it's just a bunch of people in black rushing about with guns, suddenly.

The Bottom Line
It's definitely a low-budget movie, but Last Man on Earth is a lot better than I remember it being. There's some care and thought put into the piece and I appreciated those a lot more this time around. Vincent Price is great and if the rest of the cast doesn't measure up, well, who does? Like the other adaptations of I Am Legend this one is flawed, but even a flawed gem shines if you tilt it just right to the light.

 

31 Days, 31 Horror Movies (and Fear Flashback Friday!): The Fly (1958)

The Fly (1958)

I've long labored under a misconception about the 1958 version of The Fly, one only made clear to me today. For some reason I've always thought that this movie is a sequel to an older film, a black and white movie featuring a creature that has a much larger head. However, when I went looking for the 'original' I was astonished to discover that the black and white movie I remember is actually the sequel! Despite the fact that the original was shot in color the sequel - The Return of the Fly - was shot in black and white (though still in Cinemascope, which is a little weird). I'm assuming that was for budgetary reasons. I must have seen the sequel first and simply assumed it was the original film.

I'm sure I saw both of them at my grandmother's house, probably on a rainy Saturday afternoon. It seems like I saw most of the 1950's creature features sitting on that couch, a plateful of cookies or (if I was lucky) coffee squares in front of me. I don't know which channel it was that was constantly running old sci-fi and horror movies, but I'm not sure my childhood would have been the same without it.

It's actually been a long time since I've watch this version of The Fly. The only thing I remembered clearly about this version was the horrific spider web scene, though I'd actually gotten the actors mixed up and in my memory it was Vincent Price struggling in the web. I was already arachnophobic, so that penultimate scene burned itself on my mind.

I will, occasionally, when I need something, imitate the sound of the struggling 'white headed' fly - "help meeeee, help meeeee!" My wife will look at me with a mixture of pity and... well, let's be fair, it's mostly pity.

"Help meeeee.... find the remoooote!"

The Medium
I watched this on Netflix streaming and, as has been the case with much of my recent streaming viewing, the quality was quite good. Not Blu-ray level, but satisfying even on my larger TV. Having now seen it, I'll probably be looking out for the Blu-ray release, if only for the commentary.

The Movie
The Fly is a bit strange for a horror movie. It's structure is quite different from most monster movies, in that the monster doesn't even make its first appearance until 2/3 of the way through the film. Rather than give us a shock or two up front to keep our interest the movie unfolds slowly and methodically.

Though the special effects do liven up the room a bit.

In some ways it's more a mystery than a horror movie. It starts off with the apparent murder of a scientist, Andre Delambre, by his wife, Helene. It's a horrific death - crushed in an industrial press - but it's 1958 and the gore is suggested rather than explicit. Much of the first half hour of the film is spent trying to figure out why Helene would have done such a thing. They were  a seemingly happy couple in the Ward and June Cleaver mold, but with lots of money. She freely admits to the murder, but refuses to say why. In general, she seems very self-possessed and clear-headed - except when it comes to flies. She has an unnatural focus and hysteria around one fly in particular - a fly with a white head.

 

Her brother-in-law Francois (a restrained Vincent Price) and the police inspector attempt to figure things out. Francois lies to Helene and tells her that he as the fly, but will let it go unless she tells him the truth. At that point the real story begins to unfold in flashback, as Helene tells the story of what led to that night and the industrial press.

I'm just gonna lie down here a bit, just don't press the red button. No, I said DON'T PRESS IT!

It's the standard 'man meddling in things he was never meant to know' storyline at that point, with Andre discovering teleportation and trying to work out the kinks. Helene even has a monologue about how fast technology is moving and how it's leaving morality behind. Things start to go wrong when Andre tests the machinery on the family cat and the cat never arrives. There is an eerie, disembodied howl for a few moments afterward, which was a nice - if rare at that point - creepy bit.

Of course things go horribly wrong and when Andre tries to teleport himself a fly ends up in the chamber at the same time. Their genetic material is mixed and Andre ends up with a fly head and arm, while the fly ends up with same parts of Andre. We don't see this occur - actually, even after we know something has gone wrong we still don't see the monster for another fifteen or twenty minutes. Andre keeps his head covered and his arm hidden in his jacket. This actually works quite well - as a viewer I was just as horrifically fascinated as Helene.

What? Is there something on my face?

The effects when Andre's head and arm are revealed are pretty good, much better than I expected and/or remembered. The fly head is much sleeker and the mouth parts more animated than in the sequel - it looks weirdly believable. The actor - the same who played the normal Andre - does an excellent job while unable to speak or even use facial expressions.

Of course by the time we see the monster the movie is almost over. A hunt for the 'white headed' fly in an effort to reverse the process goes awry and it escapes. Faced with a failing intellect and struggle to control his own body, Andre opts for death and enlists Helene to help him - but not before destroying his lab equipment and notes.

The most horrific sequence - the finding of the fly with the head and arm of Andre being consumed by a spider - comes mere minutes from the end. It leaves a lasting impression and is pretty damn awful even now.

That's right, take a good look - you're going to be scarred for life, just like me.

The cinematography is excellent, with the wide CinemaScope presentation and lush color giving the whole film a feeling of quality you don't expect from your average creature feature. The acting is also excellent for the time and Vincent Price is more restrained and thoughtful than in some of his later pictures. Patricia Owens as Helene is the real star, though, doing an excellent job with what is often a thankless role. When she wasn't forced to be the doting housewife she comes across as very strong and capable - someone willing to do whatever it takes to protect her family. She moves easily between hysteria and steely determination.

 I didn't really notice the music, which is a rarity for 1950's monster movies - I expect to find the horn section blaring a three or five note monster theme at every opportunity.

Duh duh dee! Duh duh dee!

The pacing is, as already mentioned earlier, quite measured. The movie is very much a slow burn and there was a feeling on my part that the filmmakers might have been a little embarrassed to be making a horror movie. The thing is, it really works - you know something horrible has happened. Something awful enough to make a doting wife kill her beloved husband. It's the reveal that's the thing - and even knowing what was coming I still bought in.

The Bottom Line

I'd forgotten how good this movie was. It's very much a 1950's horror movie, but the production values and general quality are a level or two above that of most monster pictures of the time. Yes, it's a little slow - but the payoff is worth it.