Cast:
Brian Donlevy (Henri Delambre), George Baker (Martin Delambre), Carole Gray (Patricia Stanley), Burt Kwouk (Tai), Yvette Rees (Wan), Michael Graham (Albert Delambre), Mary Manson (Judith Delambre), Charles Carson (Inspector Charas), Jeremy Wilkin (Inspector Ronet), and Rachel Kempson (Madame Fournier) Directed by Don Sharp.
Review:
Return of the Fly (1959) was not exactly a good movie to follow The Fly (1958), but you can at least understand where one would have fun in making a quick buck when success had just struck before. Robert L. Lippert loved making movies on the B-level, making over 200 movies. Of course, by 1966, now he was making movies in England that had distribution by 20th Century Fox, because making movies in Hollywood was not as cheap (plus with the Eady Levy, there was a tax on box office receipts in England for nearly two decades). This was the phase in his career that saw films such as Witchcraft (1964) and The Earth Dies Screaming (1964), for example. His career ended with The Last Shot You Hear (1969) when he and Fox mutually parted ways. At any rate, Lippert figured he could churn out one more of these films with the rights he had, so he tasked Harry Spalding, the writer behind plenty of Lippert productions, to go along with the idea. Don Sharp was recruited to direct, and he stated that the opening pages at the asylum were pretty good although he said the overall script "wasn't good enough". It did not help that he and Spalding were not particularly happy that Donlevy was cast as the lead, because Spalding actually envisioned Claude Rains (by that point 75 years old, as opposed to Donlevy, who was 64) in the role. In fact, it seemed to help Sharp lose confidence in what he made, since the only reason he did the film was to get back in the directing chair after spending months doing second-unit work on Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965); Sharp had moved from acting to directing by the mid-1950s and would direct for three decades.
The film never received a proper video release on VHS or LaserDisc, being rarely seen for many years until the 21st century, and it didn't help that the movie was little seen on release in 1965. Calling it the movie where a fly isn't present is probably the easiest way to describe it, but there are a few decent points made when not mired in complete mediocrity. Both Fly sequels aren't good, but they make useful curiosity pieces as the depths one can go in trying to draw blood from a stone. This film is technically a sequel, in that it retains the family name seen in the last two films (Delambre) and even shows a still from the second film that tries to connect the dots, although the Delambre here is...the son of the guy who got turned back into a human in the second one, I think (well, maybe the elder Delambre is the one played by Donlevy, but the second film had him named Philippe, so...). Hell, put it like this: a guy got turned into a fly, went nutty, then got turned back into a human, but his offspring have after-effects...a curse, you might say. Yep, that is what the title refers to, as the family is cursed to keep trying to do teleportation (oh, and they had tested on others, with...less than savory results); they basically act like mad scientists, but with a bit less competency (one guy teleports across the continent but can't go anywhere because he has no passport and gets sick to go along with that - the climax of his fate is just as amusing). With an 86-minute run-time, the result is a movie that doesn't particularly get more interesting than the opening scene with a woman breaking out of an asylum and casually lying her way in hitch-hiking (yes, the escape is presented in slow-motion). The rest manages to be a stiffly executed feature that moves in exactly one way that seems inevitable in plodding nature that means one is trapped with a movie that never reaches greatness or awfulness. It is too modest to go anywhere beyond mildness, as if the idea of a family trying to reach for "the greater good" is just a bit too quiet.
Well, casting the man behind a number of tough guy roles and The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) seemed like an interesting plan. Donlevy isn't terrible in the film, but I think you can see where the filmmakers seemed like they didn't have the guy they wanted, since he seems a bit too quiet to really make the role seem anything more than a pale one, and I imagine even an elderly Rains would lend some gravity to the situation. You should feel the ooze of a man who sees experiments go really wrong (including on himself) and decides to go full speed anyway. This goes for Baker as well, who has to deal with the fact that he has a middling chemistry with Gray that tries to play the angles of both having secrets on the other and her possibly going nuts (ooh, the asylum escapee thinks she is going nuts, wonder how that will work out). Seeing the reaction to the first wife being used to test the experiment (and the horrifying result probably sounds a tad more interesting, but I digress. It just seems all too plain, never really seeming to gain much steam besides a few cheap effects, such as a writhing mass concocted by teleporting two people in the same chamber, or the moments where the younger Delambre starts to show his age. The feeling of inevitability overwhelms the movie in a way that just makes things out to feel like obligation rather than general interest. There are ideas here that could make for a fun time, but it just can't go beyond first gear to really get anywhere. It is a watchable sequel, and in some ways, it may prove a bit better than Return of the Fly but neither movie hold a candle to The Fly (original or remake). If you want to see just where the road leads in sequels for horror movies and like to see obscure movies not be held out, I suppose here is your chance.
Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.
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