Cast and Crew:  Howard Shore (Score); John Getz

What It’s About:  Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is a brilliant scientist working on a new technology:  teleportation.  He woos investigative journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) by offering her exclusive coverage.  Brundle thinks he has all of the kinks ironed out of his machine, but strange things begin happening to him after his boldest experiment-testing the technology by teleporting himself.  Can Brundle find a way to reverse the process before it’s too late?

Why Watch it Today?:  The original The Fly was released on this date in 1958.  Cronenberg’s 1985 update is one of the few remakes to surpass the original, Cronenberg taking the original’s gross out of a man with a fly’s head and arm and a fly with a human face and arm and replacing them with a DNA mix-up that has Brundle slowly transforming into a hideous man-human hybrid, desperately trying to fix the problem and failing.  Cronenberg’s improvements aren’t regulated to simply having better (and more disgusting) effects, he also gives more human characters beyond the usual “scientist driven to pursue research man was not meant to pursue” of most mad scientist movies.