The Fly II (1989)

The Fly II arrived in 1989 as the unwanted offspring of a superior parent, which is thematically apt for a film about a man who gives birth to a larval sac. Chris Walas, who built the goo for David Cronenberg's 1986 remake, was promoted to director after Mick Garris fled to Critters 2. The studio wanted a teenage monster movie. Frank Darabont was brought in to punch up the drama, and the result has the texture of a committee that could not agree on a vision. Eric Stoltz plays Martin Brundle, who ages at an accelerated rate and spends his days repairing his father's telepods for the company that owns him.

The one thread worth noting is the corporate villain. Anton Bartok adopts the boy, raises him in a lab, and waits patiently for the mutation to ripen so he can sell it. This is the evil-industrialist template, and the film does grant it a modest measure of class resentment. Bartok treats a child as inventory. That is a real idea, though it sits inside a creature feature that mostly wants to show us melting flesh.

Beyond that, the film keeps its politics to itself. Beth Logan exists to be a girlfriend and, eventually, a betrayer, which is the extent of the film's interest in women. Veronica Quaife dies in the opening minutes. There is no racial consciousness, no queer subtext, no climate anxiety, no body-positive reading of a story about a man whose body becomes a horror. Nobody lectures us. It is a sequel that knows exactly what it is: a delivery system for latex and slime, and not much else. The creature crawls toward the food bowl, and the credits roll, and the culture is left undisturbed for another evening.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}