Our sequel today picks up fifteen years after the events of its originator at the graveside
service of Helene Delambre, who never really recovered after assisting
her husband’s suicide, when the scientist placed his head and hand into a
hydraulic press after his experiments in matter transportation went
staggeringly awry, where his atoms were mixed with a fly, turning him
into a monster.
Only Helene, the deceased's brother, Francois (Price), and Chief Inspector Charas knew the real truth, with the Inspector being
responsible for the murder of the other half of this failed experiment,
trapped in a spider’s web, crushing the pitiful, pleading creature with a rock
before a spider pounced.
But now, their orphaned son, Philippe (Halsey), demands to know the truth as to what really happened to his father and what
haunted his mother so badly all these years that it eventually drove the woman to an early grave. And
once his uncle spills the beans, Phillipe is soon determined to perfect
his father’s machine and secure his family's legacy. At first, Francois wants no part of this but soon
comes around -- mostly to make sure Philippe
doesn’t make the same critical mistakes his father did.
Moving all the
machinery to the basement of the old ancestral mansion, using his
father’s notes, Philippe,
Francois, and Phillipe’s assistant, Ronald Holmes (Frankham), soon have
the transporter rebuilt and fired-up and successfully disintegrate and
reintegrate several varmints. Too bad for all involved that Holmes is
acting under an alias, is a wanted man for murder, and is currently
engaging in some industrial espionage.
And after his assistant uses the contraption to destroy the body of one of Scotland Yard’s finest, Phillipe
sniffs out his true intentions before the villain can cash-out. Unfortunately
for Philippe, this confrontation does not go his way at all and he winds
up in the transporter, too. Also,
Holmes tosses a fly in there with him because, one, his former
boss suffers from a severe case of pteronarcophobia; and two, he’s seen
what the transporter can do when two different test-subjects get zapped
at the same time (-- that cop and a hamster); and three, he’s just that
big of an asshole.
Alas, Francois arrives too late to stop any of this and winds up taking a
bullet while Holmes escapes; but he does manage to trip the switches for
the reintegration process, and then comes face to face with his worst
nightmare come true...
After
squandering a ton of money converting their projection booths to
accommodate 3-D stereoscopic films, a fad that had barely lasted six
months, most theater owners were either skeptical or downright hostile
when Darryl F. Zanuck asked them to now tear all of that out and widen their screens for his
newly minted CinemaScope process in late 1953.
However, having learned
a harsh lesson over the non-standardization of the 3-D free-for-all,
Zanuck promised more consistency to appease exhibitors, promising a
steady supply of product in this new widescreen format.
To
do this, Zanuck and 20th Century Fox struck a deal to make the lenses
and equipment for CinemaScope readily available to other studios; and
Fox even went so far as to bring in Robert L. Lippert to produce a
series of B-Pictures shot in the same widescreen process.
And so, together, they formed Regal Pictures in 1956, which landed Lippert a
seven year commission to make 20-pictures per year, each shot in seven to
ten days with a budget of $100,000. Though one should note that Zanuck
hedged the deal, not allowing his new B-Unit to smirch the reputation of
his A-product, which is why things like Stagecoach to Fury (1956), Kronos (1957), and Hell on Devil’s Island (1957) were all technically shot in “Regalscope."
Fox
and Zanuck never were ones for genre pictures and seldom dabbled in
horror and sci-fi -- the only real monster movie I can think of is The Undying Monster (1942), which was pretty great if you've never seen it, which makes their production of The Fly (1958) a bit of an anomaly; especially after the big-budgeted sci-fi epics, This Island Earth (1955) and Forbidden Planet (1956), both flopped for rival studios Universal and MGM respecticely.
But even though The Fly was shot in
CinemaScope and in Technicolor, the production cost was kept fairly low, around $350,000, when compared to $800,000 for This Island Earth and $1,900,000 for Forbidden Planet. But unlike the other two films, The Fly proved to be a
huge hit for Fox and became one of its biggest money-makers of '58. And perhaps slightly embarrassed by this, but not embarrassed
enough to not cash-in, when a sequel proved to be in order, the studio
quickly distanced itself and turned the franchise over to Lippert.
By 1959, Lippert had dumped
the Regal moniker and rechristened his unit as Associated Producers
Incorporated (API). And to pull off this mandated sequel, Return of the Fly (1959), he turned to producer Bernard Glasser and director Edward Bernds -- the two men who had produced Space Master X-7 (1958), which had served as the equally successful bottom-bill for The Fly.
I delved into the cinematic history of Glasser and Bernds when I wrote up Space Master X-7 a while back,
so feel free to check that out to get up to speed on them. Meantime, the sequel would
still be shot in CinemaScope but would be demoted to black and white film stock -- just like it's co-feature, Roy Del Ruth's The Alligator People (1959). The production was also under orders to use the still
standing sets from the first film to help save even more costs, meaning it would be another rare feat for Lippert’s B-unit, where it would be allowed to actually shoot on Fox’s backlot, which had been strictly forbidden.
And as
Bernds got to work on the script, it would prove interesting enough to
coax Vincent Price back into the fold to reprise his role as Francois. Though most of those
“interesting” moments wound up cut-out, much to the star’s chagrin. As
for the main protagonist, Glasser cast Brett Halsey.
Now, Halsey seemed to be
cursed with bad timing throughout his Hollywood career. He got signed at
Universal but barely made a scratch -- though some
folks might recognize him as one of the two teens who get killed in Revenge of the Creature
(1955), the one who wasn't fastballed into a tree -- before the studio was bought out by
MCA, which cut staff and purged all contract players in 1958. But he
landed on his feet at American International, where he headlined the likes of High School Hellcats (1958) and Submarine Seahawk (1959). And then, after starring in Return of the Fly, he got signed by Fox to a multi-year contract. But then this was voided, too, after the whole Cleopatra
(1963) debacle, which nearly bankrupted the studio.
The actor would
have much better luck abroad, working with the likes of Mario Bava and
Lucio Fulci in Italy. And while Halsey does fine as Phillipe, he really isn’t in the film all that much. I swear, his pasted-on head on the tiny fly almost had as much screen-time
as the real actor did. And after his transformation, stuntman Ed Wolff,
a former circus giant, took over as the Human Fly breaks out of the
lab, is merrily chased around the hills by the cops for a spell, and
then spends the rest of the movie tracking down and killing those who
double-crossed him.
All the while, Francois, the Inspector (Sutton), and
Phillipe's
longtime girlfriend, Cecilia (De Metz), manage to capture the Fly Human
and hope the Human Fly can be herded back to the lab where they think
they can, hopefully, reverse the process.
Now, Glasser and Bernds had wanted to insert footage from The Fly
to pad out the sequel and fill-in the backstory; but Fox nixed this,
feeling the color footage wouldn’t mesh with the rest of the film properly,
leaving it to Price to get us all up to speed with a massive plot-dump
at the beginning of the film.
I
had never seen this sequel before until now; but judging from all the photos and stills I
had seen over the years, I felt the monster design and mask for Return of the Fly
looked so much better than the original. And while I still think it
looks better in theory, in action -- oh, great googily-moogily;
it's so huge the poor stuntman ensconced inside can barely keep his
balance as he runs around. Watch as Wolff keeps reaching for it, to
steady it, as the encephalitic contraption constantly wobbles and
teeters around and threatens to topple him.
Apparently,
due to his condition, the giant had little stamina as well, which hampered efforts to
give the plodding chase scenes any real juice. The inflatable proboscis
of the Human Fly was a nice touch, and they really could've had
something there if the size of the whole apparatus was, I don't know, halved? Also sad
to report that the fly with the human head FX might be even worse than
the original.
However,
I freely admit when the bad guy, played beautifully by David Frankham, sends
the cop through the transmitter, turning him into were-hamster, and then he
steps on the hamster with the human hands? Thaaaaat kinda freaked me out
a bit as the thing stubbornly refused to die.
Beyond that, Return of the Fly
is a bit too paint by the numbers to really generate any real amperage.
Not all that terrible, but no more than serviceable as far as sequels
go.
Return
of the Fly (1959) Associated Producers (API) :: 20th Century Fox Film
Corporation / P: Bernard Glasser / D: Edward Bernds / W: Edward Bernds,
George Langelaan (story) / C: Brydon Baker / E: Richard C. Meyer / M:
Paul Sawtell, Bert Shefter / S: Vincent Price, Brett Halsey, David
Frankham, Danielle De Metz, John Sutton
