Fly Me To The Moon

Year: 1989

Director: Chris Walas

Cast: Eric Stoltz, Daphne Zuniga, Lee Richardson

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The original The Fly may have already gotten two sequels, but Cronenberg's remake was produced in the 80's, so the fact that it also got a follow-up is about as unsurprising at the time as a movie being shot in color. It's just what you did. So here we have The Fly II, released three short years later under the guiding directorial hand of the '86 film's special effects supervisor. So at the very least it was helmed by someone who was literally involved in the  DNA of the franchise.

A very important element when it comes to The Fly.

Weirdly, The Fly II is almost more of a remake of Return of the Fly than The Fly '86 was of the original film. On top of the general concept, it borrows the lead character and the entire plot structure (including the fabulously messy third act and the perfunctory ending). Beyond that, a lot has changed, but I'm happy to see they at least did their homework.

We pick up with Veronica (now played by Saffron Henderson of the same year's Friday the 13th Part VIII) giving birth to the son of Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum, who only appears in the form of deleted scenes from the original as viewed on videotape). Martin looks like a perfectly normal kid, except for the fact that he's a super-genius and ages at a rapid rate, to the point that he looks like an 18-year-old Eric Stoltz by his fifth birthday. He is tapped to continue his father's project of developing a teleportation machine by Dr. Bartok (Lee Richardson), the owner of the scientific facility where he was born and raised.

During his tenure at Bartok Labs, he befriends and falls in love with night shift worker Beth Logan (Daphne Zuniga), but unfortunately reaching the age of maturity has also triggered his dormant fly DNA and his slow transformation into an inhuman beast is already well on its way. Will their love withstand his total degradation while he attempts to find a cure, with the help of a cameo-ing John Getz, the only returning cast member?

And will I ever get to the bottom of why I'm weirdly attracted to John Getz? Some questions are better left unanswered.

To be completely honest, The Fly II actually solves some of the problems of Return of the Fly right off the bat. Instead of forcing the lead to go through the exact same failed experiment as his father, it becomes a potent metaphor for a latent disease passed down from a parent. And the love interest this time around isn't some random scullery maid with no lines. She's a scientist too, and while she's still mostly just a damsel in distress, she actually has a part to play in the story here instead of sitting around waiting for flies to creep her out. 

Unfortunately, the plot here is probably the silliest of the entire franchise (and that includes a movie where a man marries a hitchhiker in her underwear). It indulges too much in splashy retro camp, including some hilarious scenes that completely misunderstand how computers work yet again and some truly bizarre dialogue where a casual conversation can somehow lead to a man throwing a champagne bottle at a floor length mirror and everybody just being cool with it. While that's hardly a detraction where I'm sitting (I always like to have me some fun with weird movies), it definitely undercuts the rawness of the horror, which is something this franchise has been reasonably good at retaining even throughout its later entries.

Martin Brundle is relatable enough (except for the scenes that take place when he's a supergenius young boy, which are a grotesque parody of Spielbergian "gee whiz" filmmaking that will rot your teeth out with their saccharine guilelessness), but the trials he goes through are buried under Walas' ravenous need to show you cool, gruesome effects. They're mostly great effects too (minus the Brundlefly's final form, which looks a little too much like a Gremlin for my tastes), with some moments that will make you want to pass the heck out, like a shot of the boy pulling mucus from his mutated elbow. But Cronenberg proved there was a way to combine grossout gags with an actual narrative arc and subtextual thematics. Here, everything in the movie is shunted aside for a third act that is loud, full of admittedly cool deaths, and droningly repetitive in every other aspect.

But the deaths really are coooooooool.

There are two things that are unequivocally great about this film though, which is still pretty solid if a bit shallow. The first is Christopher Young's epic score, which brings back the grandiose orchestral feel of Howard Shore with sweeping bombast. The second is a scene involving a failed experiment on a Golden Retriever and Martin's discovery of its terrible fate. This scene even brought tears to my eyes, and I'm a black-hearted glacier of a man when it comes to animals in movies. So yes, this film does have some compassion and depth of feeling, even though those obviously aren't its primary concerns.

The Fly II gets points for going in unexpected directions at least, which is if anything more in keeping with the franchise as a whole than I'd have thought possible. Each of these films has its own distinct personality: The Fly is daffy but grim, Return of the Fly is a campfest with kernels of existential dread, Curse of the Fly is an atmospheric gothic, The Fly '86 is a deeply felt body horror, and now The Fly II is a morality play about life and death within the capitalism of science. No two films are alike, even though they share the same general idea. This one is certainly on the lower end of the scale, but they all have something to offer that makes marathoning them in quick succession less of a thunderous slog than your average horror movie franchise.

As a member of the extended Delambre/Brundle family, The Fly II is welcome to Christmas dinner. I probably won't seek to rewatch anything but that rad face-melting scene, but it was a delightful treat even for all its empty calories.

TL;DR: The Fly II is the perfectly adequate capper to a franchise that never stumbles too far from decency.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1083

Reviews In This Series
The Fly (Neumann, 1958)
Return of the Fly (Bernds, 1959)
Curse of the Fly (Sharp, 1965)
The Fly (Cronenberg, 1986)
The Fly II (Walas, 1989)

Census Bloodbath: Back To Skull - Day 4

For the crossover review of this film over at Kinemalogue, click here.

Year: 1984

Director: Larry Stewart

Cast: Daphne Zuniga, Vera Miles, Clu Gulager

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As we venture out further and further into the murky depths of university slashers for our Back to School spectacular, things - as they are won't to do - begin to get a little hackneyed. Although I remember enjoying the 1984 sorority slashfest The Initation the first time I watched it, after about 50 of these reviews, the sheen wears off just a little.

The Initiation is a perfectly serviceable slasher with an all-star cast, but five years into the slasher boom, the flop sweat was beginning to stain the screen and it couldn't recapture the magic of similar films like the markedly superior The House on Sorority Row. 

It's at the very least better than Hell Night.

"Delta Rho Chi, Never Will Die."

This is the soon-to-be ironic motto of the local sorority, of which only 4 out of 15 pledges remain. Alison (Hunter Tylo) is your typical sorority girl - boy crazy, gorgeous, and ready to toss out full frontal at the drop of a hat. She is not the focus of our story. Megan (Frances Peterson) is the vile pledge trainer, drunk on sex and power. This is not her story. Marcia (Marilyn Kagan) is affable and demure, haunted by the taunting of the Greeks who mistake her innocence and purity for virginity. She's oh so close, but no, this is not her story. Kelly (Daphne Zuniga) is a warm-hearted pledge, the daughter of wealthy couple Dwight (Clu Gulager) and Frances Fairchild (Psycho's Vera Miles). She has lately been having dreams about a mysterious incident in her past, in which she watches her mother and father having sex in a mirror and stabs her father before another man bursts in, who then gets burned alive in a  fireplace. Whether this is a dream or a repressed memory she can never be sure, having suffered from amnesia and completely losing everything before age 9.

A-ha.

Was anybody keeping track of how many times I mentioned sex in the character descriptions? The Initiation occupies an awkward space between "at least the sexual characteristics are more varied than 'horny slut likes to bang bang'" and "this is uncomfortably dark and morally dubious." Honestly I would have preferred good old erotic exploitation to the nightmarish house of horrors that makes up about 50% of our characters' sexual development.

The "parents having sex" thing was a given, but "molested by a violin teacher" is patently not. Far better films than The Initiation would come unpinned tackling that particular topic, but this film - being what it is - careens wildly like a roller coaster car in a Final Destination movie. The Initiation handles its delicate topic in an outrageously clumsy way, suggesting that all the girl in question needs to soothe her troubled psyche is some vigorous porking.

Of which there is much to be had at Delta Rho Chi.

Sexual politics aside, The Initiation is a decent bit of fun in the immediately post-Nightmare era, one of the last gasps of non-supernatural slashers. Although the clumsy mishandling of its erotic elements plunge the film like a stone in the river of my esteem, The Initiation provides something a little different, just enough to pique my interest. 

Written by soap opera veteran Charles Pratt Jr. (whose CV includes 300 episodes of All My Children, 387 General Hospitals, and 304 Santa Barbaras), it's no accident that the plot pulls out all the soapy stops, replete with sexy dream therapists, hidden family secrets, amnesia, and SPOILERS [Evil Twins.]. The man deserves an Oscar for the "Repressed Desires" theme party alone.

But try as it might with all its lather and antics, The Initiation suffers from a lethargic first half, where it insists on being a bad college psychological drama rather than a bad soap opera slasher, which is a much less punishing thing to be. Luckily the second half delivers. When the pledges find themselves trapped in Kelly's father's mall during a prank gone wrong, the kids play in the stores, screw around with boys, and are offed one by one by a mysterious killer in creative, rewardingly drippy sequences.

For a slasher fan, it doesn't get much better than this. Perhaps it's best if you don't think about it.

The acting isn't great. Zuniga, though later she became a fairly medium-sized celebrity, is not in her best form, and James Read as her dream therapist/quasi-boyfriend lets his eyebrows completely subsume his persona. It's like watching two caterpillars battle for domination over an impassive, fleshy battlefield.

The kills aren't great. An impalement with an arrow fails to line up both sides of the appliance properly - either that or Megan has a small wormhole located just above her gallbladder - and some of the makeup shows its seams.

But there's a party full of glitter, 80's teens (by far the most likeable horror ensembles) get to play around in various mall stores doing their 80's teen thing (which, although I can't understand it for the life of me, includes doffing your top for twenty seconds, then going roller skating), and there's more blood than a lot of its peers and that adds up to a lot, ramping up the absurdity factor.

All in all, The Initiation is not the worst piece of crap I've ever seen. But I've already seen two better films this week, so I'm not going to toot its horn more than it deserves. It's a fairly entertaining movie, but as sorority flicks go, there have been way better offerings both before and after this one. If you find yourself loving The House on Sorority Row or other low budget titillators like The Slumber Party Massacre, maybe this film is worth your time, but otherwise I'd steer clear of it.

Killer: [Terry Fairchild (Daphne Zuniga)]

Final Girl: Kelly Fairchild (Daphne Zuniga)

Best Kill: I'm partial to harpoons and mid-coitus mayhem, so Ralph's death by harpoon gun while he's on top of Marcia is by far a standout.

Sign of the Times: Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like you to meet Heidi. Raise your hand if you're shocked she never made a movie outside of the 1980's.

Scariest Moment: The opening nightmare sequence is hellish, rapidly edited, and massively disorienting.

Weirdest Moment: Ralph shows up to a party dressed as a penis.

Champion Dialogue: "It's like looking for the meaning of life in a donut hole."

Body Count: 10

1. Nurse Higgins is stabbed to death with a trowel.
2. Dwight Fairchild is stabbed in the neck with a trowel. 
3. Todd is stabbed in the chest with a trowel.
4. Andy is hit in the head with an axe.
5. Megan is shot in the chest with an arrow.
6. Chad has his throat slit offscreen.
7. Allison is stabbed to death.
8. Ralph is harpooned in the back.
9. Marcia is killed offscreen.
10. [Terry is shot through the chest.]

TL;DR: The Initiation is an uneven, but pleasantly bloody and soapy affair.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1170

Census Bloodbath: Back to Skull - Day 2

Year: 1982

Director: Stephen Carpenter & Jeffrey Obrow

Cast: Laurie Lapinski, Stephen Sachs, David Snow

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It's back-to-school week and I would be remiss if I didn't include The Dorm That Dripped Blood in the college-themed proceedings. You see, it's the only film mentioned by Randy in Scream 2 that I hadn't actually seen yet. This is very important to me. It also has a presence on the Video Nasties list, the list of abhorrent films compiled by the British censorship board in the early 80's. If there's one thing I love more than slashers, it's slashers that the government doesn't want me to see.

Unfortunately but perhaps inevitably, The Dorm That Dripped Blood isn't quite as nasty as one would hope, censored largely on the strength of one scene and a poster depicting a murder weapon. But it's pleasantly charming in its ineptness as the lesser slashers in that time period tended to be. So you won't catch me complaining.

Plus, we're treated to oh so sexy scenes like this one.

The Dorm That Dripped Blood  has the perfect slasher setup. A group of college students stay in an old dorm building over Christmas break so they can empty it out and prepare it for demolition. The canned Meat this time around includes Brian (David Snow), the helpful and supposedly hunky man's man; Patti (Pamela Holland), who is somewhat uptight and clingy; Craig (Stephen Sachs), the resident prankster and horny douchebag; and Debbie (Daphne Zuniga, the only member of the cast who can afford to have a headshot on IMDb and who also appeared in the terrific 1984 slasher The Initiation), the requisite girl who announces to everyone repeatedly that she is about to leave, then becomes the killer's first main victim.

This troublesome troupe is led by Joanne (Laurie Lapinski), an officious but capable young woman who is in a waning two-year relationship with Tim (Robert Fredrickson), a pushy and rude fellow who leaves for a ski trip early on in the movie and confounds expectations by not reappearing in the third act so he can be summarily offed. The kids work and play, but when mysterious occurrences begin to haunt them, the blame falls on John Hemmit (Woody Roll), a creepy drifter who looks like the result of an illicit affair between Larry from The Three Stooges and a tornado.

The film leads with its best elements - a healthy platter of college-aged victims and an intriguingly brutal sensibility. It's not particularly gory and the gore itself isn't particularly well-executed (one notable strangling has the woman's collar bleeding several inches above the wire around her neck), but the two scenes that really go for it hit the mark (well enough to land the film on the Video Nasties list, although offending the British isn't exactly a demanding achievement), landing at exactly the right points in the film to fuel any gorehound in the audience. And the many kills that are sentenced to exist slightly more offscreen still tend to feel gritty and savage in the best way possible.

If this doesn't fit your definition of "best way possible," maybe this movie isn't for you.

It's a good thing the kills are so (relatively) intense, because the rest of the film is so anemic. No single element is film-breaking, but that's only because each individual piece of The Dorm That Dripped Blood was broken before they even thought about coming together as a whole. In fact, the film is so resoundingly incompetent - and one's enjoyment of the film is so necessarily hinged on one's capacity to appreciate that fact - that I feel the need to expound upon this in a more lengthy manner than I typically prescribe.

• The Editing: With copious use of dissolves that don't so much show passage of time as conceal deficiencies in coverage, The Dorm That Dripped Blood plays like a bad pornographic film. This is doubly embarrassing considering that the far more technically competent 1981 slasher know as Hell Night actually was shot by a porn director. If an internship in the porn industry could improve your film, maybe it's not quite time to be making features yet.
• The Sound Design: In between more routine moments like footstep sound effects failing to match the actual footsteps, when the music attempts to be thrilling, it typically drowns out the dialogue, including one conversation that provides a major key to deciphering the finale.
• The Cinematography: In most slashers, the cinematography only exists to put the gore onscreen, not to present it in any meaningful or artistic way. The Dorm That Dripped Blood ups the ante not only by failing to be artistic, but by fundamentally misunderstanding what it means to light and shoot a moving image. Actors step in and out of a single, retina-searingly bright key light as if their only equipment was a lighthouse beacon. An important kiss scene is shot from yards away and the actors all have such interchangeable shag haircuts that it's nigh on impossible to tell who is kissing whom. My money is on Craig and Brian. There's no sense of geography, just that of seven or so separate locations that exist without a modicum of contact with one another. And several conversations are shot in a dark room with a spotlight bearing down on a table, as if the table is drifting through the all-knowing Void. At least that staging makes some sense, as it's likely a ploy to hide the severe errors in...
• The Production Design: The Dorm That Dripped Blood was clearly shot in some sort of warehouse, because not once does a set remotely resembling an actual dorm room come into play. Nearly every location is made up of four stark white walls, sometimes spruced up with a wan-looking rainbow flag. And due to the disconnected nature of the locations and the "cleaning up the dorm" thing, many of the requisite killer POV shots feel like B-roll from an unfinished documentary about garbage, rarely having anything to do with the victim being stalked, sometimes taking place in established locations halfway across the building from where we believe the prey to be. Although, of course, any sense of spatial relationships would merely be conjecture, requiring an advanced degree in nuclear astrophysics to accurately follow along.
• The Plot: There's the usual Idiot Plot trappings - Joanne doesn't decide to call the police until long after the line has been cut, she closes her blinds but not the window, and there's "I'll be right back"s galore. But the true whammy is in the finale, so I'm gonna spoiler block it just in case. [After the killing is finished and John Hemmit is out of the picture, Craig nonchalantly reveals that it was him the whole time. He just tosses off that dialogue like a bit of idle chatter long before he devolves into the obligatory Final Ten Minutes psycho. There is little to no justification for this, merely the sense that a slasher really ought to have a twist so why not this one? A true classic ending.]
• The Characters: First off, the main character trait in the film is that everyone wants to bang Joanne, despite the fact that she has about as much personality as a waffle iron. It's an epidemic claiming Tim, Brian, Craig, and even Bobby Lee Tremble (Dennis Ely), the man with the best name in recorded history who just wanted to buy some desks but got caught in Joanne's mighty gravitational field of inexplicable lust. Although my favorite anecdote that exemplifies the wafer thin characterizations is the fact that when Joanne needs to go get Brian and ask him for a favor, she opens the elevator door and he's just standing there blankly by the wall, merely a prop waiting to be called into use. It's too much to ask for slasher characters to have inner life, but an outer one would be nice. But here, characters that are offscreen merely cease to exist, lending credence to my theory that the director/screenwriter team wrote the first draft as infants before object permanence kicked in. That would at least justify the needlessly overexplanatory dialogue that runs rampant throughout the entire thing.

"How many EGGS do you want? I sure do hate SPIDERS. I hope there's no SPIDERS in my EGGS. What a PRANK, Craig!"

It's bad, is what I'm saying. But there are different tiers of bad. There's To All a Goodnight bad, where  everything is dull, underlit, and goreless. And there's The Room bad where everything is so sincerely terrible it's hard not to appreciate the pure misguided effort that fuels the whole thing. The Dorm That Dripped Blood is somewhere in between, not as thoroughly engrossing as Tommy Wiseau's masterwork nor as insipidly stupor-inducing as David Hess's lump of coal.

It's a rather workaday slasher that will neither offend nor titillate modern audiences, but it has that magic of pure 80's trash cinema that makes it worth viewing for any enthusiast. Don't put The Dorm That Dripped Blood on your Netflix queue unless you're thoroughly prepared with a squadron of chums and a full box of pizza.

Killer: [Craig (Stephen Sachs)]

Final Girl: Joanne (Laurie Lapinski)

Best Kill: Definitely the one that earned the movie its Video Nasty rating - the drill through the back of the head.

Sign of the Times: In true slasher dreck fashion, The Dorm That Dripped Blood has gone through a variety of names - also operating under the aliases Pranks and Death Dorm.

Scariest Moment: A shock scare in the very first scene is the first slasher gag in a while that's actually caught me off guard, although in retrospect perhaps it shouldn't have.

Weirdest Moment: Debbie's trip to find something in the basement storage room somehow lands her on the roof.

Champion Dialogue: "I'm sorry I took the bread. I just took it."

Body Count: 10

1. Some Random Dude is strangled and his hand is sliced in half.
2. Debbie's Dad is hit with a spiked bat.
3. Doris is garroted with wire.
4. Debbie is run over by a car.
5. Bill is drilled in the back of the head.
6. Brian is slashed with a machete.
7. Patty is boiled alive in a pot of water.
8. John Hemmit is slashed with a machete.
9. Bobby Lee Tremble is shot to death.
10. [Joanne is incinerated offscreen.]  

TL;DR: The Dorm That Dripped Blood is only memorable for its badness, but the relative quality of its kills and the ubiquity of its ineptitude render it more than a total dud.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1767