Curse Of The Fly (1965)......exists as the little thought of, unwanted stepchild of "The Fly" movies....much like 1982's "Halloween III: Season Of The Witch", the long forgotten bastard stepchild of the 'Halloween franchise.
Just as there's no Michael Myers slashing his way through "Halloween III", in "Curse Of The Fly", there's no member of the star-crossed, French-Canadian Delambre family who ends up with a housefly's head parked on his shoulders........(for our musings on the 2nd film in the canon, 1959's "Return Of The Fly", refer to our post on 2/1/19)
Which doesn't mean the Delambres aren't up to their old tricks - trying to dis-assemble people's atoms in a glass box and transmit them, like a wireless signal to another glass box where they'll pop up re-assembled....thereby negating the need for airline, train or bus tickets.....
And that, boys and girls, is technology that we all know wasn't fully perfected until Gene Roddenberry's "Star Trek" TV show featured people "beaming" themselves from place to place. (When people beam themselves up and down in those shows and movies, evidently nobody worries about their atoms getting mixed up with a stray fly.....)
In this third episode of the "Fly" saga, the Delambres still have big dreams of teleporting people from coast to coast and across the seas. Too bad that their various failed attempts have reduced two of their lab assistants and one of their wives to gibbering monstrous mutants, kept locked up in convenient cells on the family's sprawling estate.
Hey, nobody said science was easy........
True love returns to Martin Delambre (George Baker), husband of the currently locked-up mutant wife. He falls hard for Pat (Carole Grey), a nervous concert pianist freshly escaped from an asylum where she was recovering from a stage fright breakdown. Poor kid.....talk about jumpin' out of the frying pan and into the fire....(though 12 year old boys in the throes of puberty no doubt enjoyed her fleeing the booby hatch dressed only in a bra and undies.....)
The secret that Martin's teleporting is gradually turning him into a mutant never comes up as the lovebirds do a quickie marriage before settling in at the Delambre mansion.
At the big homestead, a typical-for-the-time sinister oriental couple (Burt Kwouk of "The Pink Panther" films and Yvette Rees) tend to the mutants while Martin's forced to teleport the family's Big Daddy (Brian Donelevy) out of London and back to the Canada lab, even though his skin's gone mutant-ized as well. The younger London-based younger brother of the family (Michael Graham) the only non-mutant of the bunch doesn't much like any of these goings-on.......
Sure enough, it doesn't take long before all three mutants run rampant, allowing Pat to rip out some serious horror movie screams. Martin succumbs to full mutant-ism and two of the other mutants get fused in the teleporter as they're tandem-zapped back to London. As for Big Daddy Donelevy, his gruesome fate is simply too priceless to describe and one of the film's best moments.
Silly to the max but damn if it doesn't have its moments......and director Don Sharp (a veteran of Hammer pulp like 'Kiss Of The Vampire' and 'Rasuputin The Mad Monk') knows how to keep it all moving and fun to watch.....even without a single fly in sight.
Classic horror film completists should check this one out at least once. 2 & 1/2 stars. (**1/2).
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