RETURN
OF THE FLY (1958)
20th Century Fox
Rated: No rating |
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"What’s
that? We’ve got money left over from THE
FLY? How much? Twenty-seven dollars? Use it to make a sequel."
RETURN
OF THE FLY was co-written and directed by Edward Bernds (THE
THREE STOOGES MEET HERCULES). It would have been more aptly titled
"Son of the Fly", since the story takes place fifteen years
later and centers around Phillipe Delambre (Brett
Halsey: REVENGE OF THE
CREATURE, DEMONIA, QUANDO ALICE RUPPE LO SPECCHIO, IL GATTA NERO,
UN GATTO NEL CERVELLO), the grown up son of André Delambre,
the scientist horribly transformed in the previous film.
The story
opens with the funeral of Phillipe's mother. In attendance is Phillipe's
uncle Francois (Vincent Price: THE OFFSPRING, THE
STRANGE CASE OF ALICE COOPER). After the service Phillipe and Francois
have to fend off a tabloid reporter curious about the details of Phillipe's
father's death. Riding home in the limo conversation makes it plain
that Francois has never told Phillipe exactly what happened. Francois
reluctantly reveals all and even takes Phillipe on a tour of his father's
long abandoned lab. It turns out that Phillipe has been studying his father's
work on teleportation and become a scientist himself. He decides to pick
up where his father left off, and all Francois’ warnings of the dire
consequences that await those who seek knowledge "man was not meant
to know" are fruitless.
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Phillipe
hires his friend Ronald (David Frankham: TALES OF
TERROR) as a lab assistant, but finds out too late that Ronald
is a con man bent on stealing the teleporter for himself. When Ronald
is found out he overpowers Phillipe and decides to have a bit of fun with
Phillipe’s fear of flies . . .
Don’t
get me wrong. This movie was terrible. THE FLY
was in Technicolor but THE
RETURN OF THE FLY is in very bad black and white. The whole
movie has a cheap feeling, like an afterthought. Vincent Price is the
only decent actor and he’s not used enough, and the special effects
are just sad, even allowing for the era. The fly head looks like one of
those oversized Mardi Gras masks.
!!!SCIENCE
MOMENT!!!:
Teleportation, even as described in a bad movie like this, isn’t
quite impossible. But let’s consider the technique:
This device works by scanning you and recording the position of every
particle in your body, disintegrating you and sending you and your data
to the receiver, which reassembles you. So for each atom in your body
you need three numbers (x,y,z) to indicate
location, plus another number to indicate what kind of atom it is and
maybe one more to indicate the atom’s state (ionized,
etc.) All these numbers represent about 20 bytes (in
computerese) of information. Take that times the number of particles
in your body (something in the neighborhood of 3
x 1027 atoms) and you get 6 x 1019 gigabytes of information storage
required each time. A good, top of the line computer (for
March, 2000 -Feo) comes with a hard drive that can store about
20 gigabytes. You’d need 2.8 x 1018 computers (enough
for every person on Earth to have more than 465 million computers each).
Think of the download time! Each transmission would take so long it’d
be quicker to walk.
There’s
not one memorable thing about this movie. I give it a forgettable two
shriek girls.
This
review copyright 2000 E.C.McMullen Jr.
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