Kurt Neumann
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The re-working of the 1958 horror classic The Fly gave him fertile ground to explore this theme.
If any film is deserving of the term "re-imagination" as opposed to "remake," it's David Cronenberg's 1986 The Fly.
Cronenberg's new film, "The Fly" (citywide Friday), plunges deeper into the forbidding realm of genetic dysfunction with genuinely unsettling results.
While 1958’s Universal horror film “The Fly” was in fact a truly creepy and bleak horror drama with little to no story elements that signaled a clear cut resolution for anyone that would ensure a life of sanity, it almost seemed like a film that held unrealized potential.
I’ve enjoyed space exploration movies, going all the way back to cheesy movies like “Rocketship X-M” in the 1950s.
The approach to the change is a weird blend of Cronenbergian body horror (especially The Fly) with a nod to the 1959 version of The Fly and possibly The Quatermass Experiment (1955)—and a dose of the kind of gross-out humor one finds in producer Peter Jackson’s early horror comedies.
Depp’s performance aside, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is pure magic, swimming as it is in a black-treacle riptide of astonishing Oompa Loompa production numbers, an eerie patina of CGI airbrushing (Wonka himself looks downright pasteurized), and some almost too clever in-jokes, and at least two references to Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film The Fly.
With Rocketship X-M, Kurt Neumann taught us a half-century ago that cinematic science fiction, when at a loss for better ideas, isn't afraid to hitch earthbound cosmological visions to a rhetoric of speechless wonder.
Reddish flowers start covering the Gardners’ grounds (a shout-out to Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body-Snatchers?), and a mutant insect provides a glimpse of Mantis vision (like Karl Struss’s subjective camera for the 1958 The Fly).
Japan gave us “Godzilla” (1958) and “Mothra” (1961), but American filmmakers also capitalized on the nuclear hysteria by cranking out plenty of minor box-office hits—like “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” (1953), “Them!” (1954), “It Came from Beneath the Sea” (1955), “Tarantula” (1955), “The Blob” (1958), “The Tingler” (1959), and this mad scientist classic, “The Fly” (1958)—which posters proclaimed was “The monster created by atoms gone wild!”