The Fly Collection (The Fly [1958] / Return Of The Fly / The Curse Of The Fly)
by Kurt Neumann, Don Sharp, Edward Bernds
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DVD details
Actor: David Hedison, Herbert Marshall, Kathleen Freeman, Patricia Owens, Vincent PriceDirector: Don Sharp, Edward Bernds, Kurt Neumann
Brand: Fly
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Box set, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 260 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-09-11
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: 20th Century Fox
DVD Reviews of The Fly Collection (The Fly [1958] / Return Of The Fly / The Curse Of The Fly)
DVD Review: Disc Breakdown Below. Curse One Very Underrated Film. The Fly One of the Best Trailers Ever.
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great set as is each film in it. The Fly is the all around best film of the set but it doesn't win that easily. Return of the fly changed the look by filming in black and white to give it a more artier feel which Price strongly disagreed with (I do as well)among other things during filming. Return is the funniest/campiest of the bunch. For example once I saw the guinea pig with little human hands the film had me. I also believe Return is the most suspenseful of the set. The Curse of the Fly is better than just ok as I've read from other reviewers and is the second best of the bunch in my opinion. Curse is also the most artsy picture, here there is no human fly, literally at least.
THE FLY: 5/5 (Overall Best)
I learned in the ten page book that comes with this set that The Fly first appeared in Playboy Magazine in 1957, winning the magazines best story of the year. A former soldier for Britain's Intelligence Army during World War II, George Lagelaan, wrote the Novella and actually underwent surgery while enlisted to change his identity, thought that was interesting considering the material.
A more subdued Price not yet a permanent horror staple delivers as usual as Francois Delambre, whose brother Andre Delambre has developed a way to transport matter. Most know the story, eventually Andre tries to teleport himself and a common housefly gets trapped in one of the machines, the result is a cross between a Fly and a human. The fly mask isn't the over the top part you think it will be prior to seeing this, that comes later, but I felt the simple towel used to hide Andre's head head was subtle and effective.
The Fly coming after WWII and creation of the atom bomb people had a fear of what radiation and it's effects could do. I felt The Fly's message was not to mess with nature. The ending wasn't happy but had a happy feel to it that I didn't feel fit, HOWEVER it made it all the more unsettling.
RETURN OF THE FLY: 4.5/5 (Most Suspenseful)
Filmed in black and white return as I said above is the most suspenseful and over the top, at times. Following his mother's funeral Phillippe Delambre, Andre's son wants to pursue his father's work all his family has suffered hasn't been in vein. He asks his uncle Francois (Price)for help (Price) which he eventually, reluctantly does. The plot is plausible, I remember thinking how is the exact same thing going to happen again, but the story is done well so that it makes sense.
THE CURSE OF THE FLY: 5/5 (Most Artistic)
Completely underrated. Curse begins with the smashing out of a window followed by a young attractive woman escaping from something only to stumble into a member of the Delambre clan and he helps her. They soon marry without knowing one another and he takes her back to his house/lab. The Delambres are still at work on their families invention and can actually teleport humans. There is no fly in this film literally but the young girl above is trapped in this house metaphorically like one. The film is all serious this time with no campy moments, just a feeling of dread. Great special effects and make up in this one which comes the closest to Cronenberg's version The Fly [Blu-ray] as far as an attempt to shock the viewer. I felt The Curse of The Fly had a feel of the classic Eyes Without a Face - Criterion Collection.
THE FLY COLLECTION DISC OF HORRORS
1997 Vincent Price Biography (originally on A/E network). Commentary during the Biography with his daughter and historians.
Fly Trap: Catching a classic Featurette
Still Galleries
Pressbooks, Posters and more.
The more, also consists of Original Trailers. I felt The Fly trailer was one of the most effective I have seen next to the original trailer for The Shining [Blu-ray] where the blood fills the halls and thats it. Both are perfect examples of less is more. I felt The Curse of The Fly's trailer made it actually look worse then it was.
Ten Page Booklet: 5/5
Great booklet and something you'd see from Criterion DVD. Interesting info on each film. This set and the booklet are all meat and no filler. Highest recommendation possible.
DVD Review: Put away that flyspray!
Summary: 4 Stars
Mad scientists, pretty girls and killer insects abound in this great value box set which comprises the original "Fly" trilogy, plus a fourth disc loaded with bonus materials!
THE FLY was based on a well-received story written by George Langelaan for Playboy Magazine, and was brought to the screen by Twentieth Century Fox in 1958. Lushly filmed in CinemaScope and Deluxe Colour, it provided audiences with a far more sleek and stylish horror movie than they would be used to seeing. It's topline stars Vincent Price and Herbert Marshall, two of the leading character actors of their generation, added another layer of prestige to the production.
The story is told in flashback. The beautiful Helene Delambre (Patricia Owens) is charged with the gruesome murder of her husband Andre (David 'Al' Hedison) after his crushed body is discovered in the Delambre factory. Helene insists that Andre told her to kill him, following an experiment that went disastrously wrong, involving the cross-fire of atoms belonging to Andre and a common house-fly. Andre's brother Francois (Vincent Price) and Inspector Charas (Herbert Marshall) remain unconvinced--until a fly with Andre's head is seen trapped in a spiderweb... Co-starring Kathleen Freeman and little Charles Herbert ("Houseboat", "13 Ghosts"), THE FLY is still one of the most unsettling and intense horror movies from the 1950s. The disc also includes a bonus audio commentary track with the 'Fly' himself, David Hedison.
In THE RETURN OF THE FLY, filmed the following year, we get a good sense of continuity with Vincent Price reprising his role of Francois Delambre. The story opens several years after the events of "The Fly". Following the death of Helene, Andre's now-grown son Philippe (Brett Halsey) is determined to continue his father's work, much to the horror of Francois. But Philippe's honest and honourable intentions are destroyed by his devious assistant (David Frankham) who turns Philippe into another hideous fly-creature. Can Francois save him from the same fate that Andre suffered? RETURN OF THE FLY also co-stars Danielle de Metz (best-remembered as the Italian tourguide in "Gidget Goes to Rome") and John Sutton.
Things get a lot more gruesome and darker in THE CURSE OF THE FLY, filmed in 1965. Andre Delambre's grandson Martin (George Baker) wants to carry on the family legacy, but the arrival of his lovely new wife Pat (Carole Gray), who escaped from a psychiatric hospital, complicates everything. In the gloomy Delambre mansion, the deformed victims of "failed experiments" lurk, including Martin's former wife Judith (Mary Manson), and it's only a matter of time before Pat discovers the whole sickening truth...
Filmed on location in England (hence it's British stars George Baker and Carole Gray), CURSE OF THE FLY also features Brian Donlevy, Rachel Kempson, and Michael Graham. Burt Kwouk and Yvette Rees ("Witchcraft") are the Delambre's Asian house-servants, with the laughable names of Tai and Wan. CURSE OF THE FLY was originally released in a theatrical double bill with "Devils of Darkness", another British horror title co-starring Carole Gray.
The bonus fourth disc, entitled "Disc of Horrors", includes a brief ten-minute featurette which touches on all three movies. The 50-minute Biography episode for Vincent Price ("The Versatile Villain") provides an absorbing portrait of a man whose interests and talents ran in many directions. There are also selective photo galleries for each of the three "Fly" movies. The four discs are housed in individual slimline cases, packed together in an attractive slipcover which displays key artwork from all three movies. Each disc is single-layered; the movies themselves are in their correct 2:35:1 widescreen aspect ratio, enhanced for 16:9 displays.
This bargain-priced collectors' set is a must for all fans of classic horror.
DVD Review: Fantastic Collection
Summary: 5 Stars
I saw and bought it without hesitation. I love sci-fi from the 50's, so this was an unexpected delight. First, the images are great. I have never seen the original format of The Fly -- always on 4:3 TV. The sound is better than expected (4 channel!). The sequel is better than I remembered it. Very entertaining. The last movie I have to say surprised me: I've never seen it, which was a good reason to buy the set. A very good sci-fi thriller. Many lab scenes, which are of course required for sci-fi movies. Really creepy. Some reviewer mentioned that the chronology didn't make sense: the father in the third movie was a middle aged man yet the grandson of Hedison in the first. It's explained, sort of: the police inspector quickly mentions that when Phillippe (in Return) had his genes mixed with the fly, it gave him rapidly accelerated aging. It's still a good, fun movie.
I wish they made more movies like this now days. I've seen the remake, and it makes me sick. Too violent, gory, too much sex. If I am watching the original movies and a child entered the room, I wouldn't be bothered at all. But if a child walked in as I was watching the man-fly-machine mess blow its head off at the end of the remake, I would stop the player and turn off the tv. 50's movies were more innocent, and 20th Century (as well as other studios) still have some fun ones lurking in vaults just waiting for DVD release. I hope they hurry...I'm getting old.
DVD Review: Nice presentation of pretty good movies
Summary: 4 Stars
While the 1950's will forever be THE decade of movie science fiction, Fox studios actually contributed very little to the genre during that time. But they started the decade (well, in 1951) with one of the best-known and simply BEST films of its kind, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and in 1958 gave us one of the quintessential creatures of the era with THE FLY. My own view is that the film's reputation looms a bit larger than its actual entertainment value. The main problem, hardly an uncommon one for a low-budget film of this kind, is that it's all a bit talkly. The title creature is only on-screen for a minute or two, and star Vincent Price is absent for large chunks of the running time. Still, the script (based on a short story appearing in Playboy magazine a year earlier) is intelligent and the performances are more than adequate.
Price was lured back a year later for Return of the Fly, although he has been vocal over the years in his lack of enthusiasm for the film. But as sci-fi/horror sequels go, it's not a bad effort. With the "more is more" sequel mantra firmly in place, the story gives us more violence and more Fly. The third film in the series, Curse of the Fly, is something of an anomaly. It features the grandfather of the original film's scientist, but otherwise the film's continuity threads are quite thin. As someone has pointed out, there is no "fly" in the film, which probably helps explain the disappointing reception it received upon release.
As for extras, the "Disc of Horrors" includes a too-brief documentary (all three films are covered in just 10 minutes), trailers and various still image galleries. I have to say I was disappointed in the documentary, as a film of THE FLY's reputation certainly warrants a deeper exploration of its creation (by contrast, note that the doc included with Day the Earth Stood Still is longer than the movie itself!). A & E's biography of Vincent Price is very well-done, though it was previously available on the excellent Heroes of Horror.
All three films look and sound as good as they probably ever will, and are presented in their original Cinescope widescreen format. For fans of fifites sci-fi, The Fly Collection has been a long time coming. And while I maintain my opinion that the films are not quite classics, this is definitely a set worth owning.
DVD Review: Insomnia cure
Summary: 5 Stars
Thank you Fox for releasing this set, it cured my insomnia. Now I can sleep easy when the movie is on. No more pills yeah!
Description of The Fly Collection (The Fly [1958] / Return Of The Fly / The Curse Of The Fly)
No Description Available.Genre: Horror
Rating: NR
Release Date: 11-SEP-2007
Media Type: DVD
A bonafide must-have for classic science fiction fans, The Fly Collection brings together the original 1958 chiller with Return of the Fly and Curse of the Fly, its 1959 and 1965 sequels, respectively, and treats fans to a wealth of terrific supplemental features and improved image quality. Kurt Neumann's The Fly has lost little of its punch in the 50 years since its release; though it lacks the visceral shock of David Cronenberg's 1986 remake, James Clavell's script expands upon the original source material by author George Langelaan with a maturity and depth that was rarely seen in movie science fiction from the period, and the performances by Vincent Price, Herbert Marshall, and David Hedison (billed as Al Hedison) as the ill-fated scientist whose experiments with matter transferal leave him with the human-sized head of a fly (one of the indelible images of '50s sci-fi) are tightly reined and believable. Quickly generated to cash in on The Fly's box office windfall, Return of the Fly is decidedly less solid than its predecessor--it's a basic retread of the original, with Brett Halsey as Hedison's son making the same mistake as his father--but as pure B-movie entertainment, it delivers the goods, and the returning Vincent Price lends his usual air of credibility. The final entry in the Fly franchise, the little-seen Curse of the Fly, makes its U.S. DVD debut with this set; it's pulpy fun at best, but genre veteran Don (Hammer's Kiss of the Vampire) Sharp brings some surprising moments of surrealism to the proceedings, most notably in the hallucinatory opening sequence (Carole Gray flees the grounds of a dark estate clad only in her white undergarments) and its parade of horrific failed genetic experiments.
The Fly Collection offers all three films in single discs (each featuring reproductions of the films' original poster art), as well as a fourth disc, The Disc of Horrors, which provides a barrage of related extras. Image-wise, the look of the films is top-notch; The Fly is a marked improvement over the 2000 DVD release, with the rich DeLuxe colors and vivid detail of the original CinemaScope presentation receiving a marvelous showcase. Even the lesser quality of Return and Curse's black-and-white lensing looks crisp and largely spot-free. Sound is also superior (Fly is Dolby Digital 4.0, and Return and Curse have Dolby Digital monaural and Dolby Digital Stereo options), and Hedison is featured in a commentary on Fly that's filled with production reminiscences. The Disc of Horrors is the real treat in the set; not only is Price's 1997 profile from A&E's Biography series included, but there's also Fly Trap: Catching a Classic, a solid overview of all three films featuring Hedison and Halsey, as well as film historians David Del Valle and Donald F. Glut, among others (some of the pertinent details are also covered in the set's insert booklet). Theatrical trailers for each film (and TV spots for Return and Curse), reproductions of the original pressbooks (which can be viewed in detail), domestic and international lobby cards, promotional photos (the best of which is a shot of Hedison in full fly makeup listening patiently to co-star Patricia Owens), and a 1958 newsreel that covered the first Fly's premiere in San Francisco. -Paul Gaita
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