I guess Anabelle is a much bigger fan of monster movies of the Fifties than of the Thirties and Forties. We've made almost no progress through the Universal classics, but have completed the Shout Factory Fly box set in record time. She also really liked The Blob when we caught it on television in her younger days, but sadly I wasn't recording her reactions. This is likely due to expecting her to change the channel instead of get engrossed by it.
I hadn't seen most of the Fly films, and we were enjoying the experience as a family far too much to get distracted by taking detailed notes. Rosa joined in as well, which is a testament of the quality of the "good" ones.
See, anything can be a "family film" if you have the right family.
Instead of full quote lists, here are some highlights.
The Fly
1958
We caught the second half of this one when she was little. She remembered enough to go, "heeeeeeelp meeeeee!" at appropriate moments but that was it.
Overall it holds up really well. Having Vincent (Rattigan, Egghead) Price in it attracted her attention immediately. I never made the connection that Andre Delambre was Felix Leiter until this go around.
We all got into the suspense of the flashback in a frame story. At first Anabelle was highly suspicious of Price, when he admitted to being in love with his brother's wife. My explanation of "Its like the Schuyler Sisters," helped and she was fine with him after that. Plus, he's Vincent Price, how can you not like him?
Mostly we'd both make stupid "Bzzzzzzzzzz" noises whenever anyone knocked on the door of the lab during the period Andre was hiding. Honestly, we've continued to go, "Buzz buzz," with little provocation since we started watching these, regardless of the setting.
Also, we'd break into choruses of "Gaston" when the factory worker with that name showed up.
Anabelle modified the lyrics to fit the story.
"No one tries like Gaston,
Makes some pies like Gaston,
No one watches his friends turn to flies like Gaston!"
There wasn't much to make fun of here. That's the problem with well made movies. The film was suspenseful with several great jump scares. The fly head and arm prosthetics were well done, creepy looking and had just enough movement built in to be unsettling. The overall story kept all three of our attentions.
Not having enough to make fun of would not be an issue in subsequent outings.
1959
In less than a year they pumped out a sequel, ditching the technicolor film that allowed a HUGE blood stain on the press in the previous outing.
This one was a hoot and a half, proving once again a bad movie can be more entertaining that a good one. The bittersweet ending of the previous film where Andre's wife Helene was warming to his brother and both of them were shielding her son Philippe from his Dad's flyness, veered heavily into bitter very quickly during Price's opening narration at her grave side.
Vincent Price finally came clean to the young man after Helene's funeral, and learned Philippe had already set himself up in the basement of the family mansion to work on teleportation experiments. Anabelle spent most of the film yelling at him through the screen:
"WHAT PART OF 'YOUR FATHER TURNED INTO A FLY' DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?!?!?!!?!?"
She cheered Gaston's return, even though it was a different actor, but he didn't have enough screen time to merit another verse of the song.
The story was clever enough to not repeat it being a second accident leading to flyness. For variety, the evil, industrial espionage man- Alan- did the fly teleportation to Philippe on purpose, after giving a dead police inspector Guinea pig hands...
This was far creepier looking than it should have been.
Anabelle repeatedly called Alan, "The worst."
Seriously, for experiments you'd think should be run in a clean room, there were a crapload of flies all around its location.
All three of us were in hysterics once the transformation happened. Besides an arm and a head, poor Philippe also ended up with a fly foot.
Or a "Floot" as Anabelle dubbed it.
Aside: for no adequate reason, we found the word "Floot" to be hysterical, and referenced it often in every film of the franchise we watched after this one. You have been warned.
This put the returned fly in competition with the Mummy as the slowest monster in screen history. Not helping his speed was his giant, Mardi Gras sized, fly head, that got tangled in tree branches, door frames and everywhere else he tried to go. Anabelle was laughing way too hard to make witty comments during most of fly Philippe's rampage.
This film did have a happy ending, YAY!
Philippe was cured and reunited with his love. I was kind of amazed at how many elements- such as the ending, the father and son legacy, plus a few other bits from the third film, made it into the sequel of the 1986 remake. But more on those later.
1965
They waited six years to return to the Delambre family.
They should have waited longer.
No wonder they didn't make any more for about two decades.
Rosa pointed out the biggest issue with this film, "THERE WAS NO FLY AT ALL!"
Its a Delambre father and son this time around, Henri and Martin, who have delved way into mad scientist territory. They've experimented on a bunch of people for trans-Atlantic teleportation. Anabelle called the duo all manner of ill names for their lack of morals and propensity for gaslighting. There's no insect combinations this time, just people who got icky from transporting.
Martin falls in love with Patricia, who opens the film by breaking out of a window in her underwear.
How a window got in her underwear I don't know.
She's an escaped mental patient...and the most sane person in the film. There's a bit of Rebecca going on with her and the housekeeper, who the Delabre's aid as she does the heavy duty gaslighting.
Except in this version Rebecca is named Judith, still alive, and horribly disfigured in a teleportation accident. Honestly, there's so much other weirdness going on its hard to tell, but I do think the reference was deliberate.
Instead of flyness, the Delambre men have an issue with rapid aging. The aging is far less fun than Fly parts, since you don't see any effects except for dad's brief skin condition reveal, and son's turning into a cheap Halloween decoration at the end. There are some interestingly gross bits when more than one person is teleported separately, and then integrated together that got Anabelle to go "bleah!"
The continuity is massively snarled and when they refer to the old films they graft the story of the second one to the characters of the first. Since the photo is of Philippe's super-inflated head version, Anabelle decided the old inspector, "Is old" and messed up the generations he was talking about. Also, the possibility exists that being played by a different actor every time might have affected his memory. Therefore in our home, Henri is Philippe's son, and Martin and the only one in the family with any sort of conscience (Albert) are his grandsons. Since Philippe could grow up between 1958 and 1959, she figured a whole generation could pass in six years.
Anabelle gave Albert a great deal of sympathy and shout outs during the proceedings, while yelling at the other two for being truly horrible people. Mostly she encouraged them both to spontaneously mutate into flies, often yelling, "And then he sprouts a Floot!"
It is my belief, that at some point after this unpleasantness Albert had a daughter who married into the family "Brundle," making the Delambre's ancestors to the main character of the 1986 remake. Seth was a system guy who admitted he didn't understand all the details. He had to get the idea from somewhere...old family notes maybe?
It is also my belief that the funniest point in the film was when the final title card came up, stating-
"The End...Or Is It???"
and Rosa yelled,
"GOD I HOPE SO!"
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