The Fly (1986)

What makes The Fly such a stunning piece of obsessive film making is the way Cronenberg deftly allows us to identify with his monstrous creation.

Wildly imaginative, gut-wrenchingly scarifying and profoundly primal (not to mention funny), David Cronenberg's The Fly is a movie that whacks you in the solar plexus and leaves you gasping.

What's good about the film are the strong performances and the ingenious, mostly amusing script. What's ugly, of course, is the grossness. And what's bad is the movie's inability to reconcile its good and ugly aspects.

As slimy and as grotesque as some of its special effects become, The Fly is a far superior horror film to the top-grossing film in America of late, Aliens.

The Fly seizes on our ingrained, instinctive horror of sexuality, the sense of shame that our fundamentally puritanical society can't help but teach us, and by confirming our worst fears, helps us, for a moment, to move beyond them.

A gross-your-eyes-out horror movie that is also the year's most poignant romance.

At its best, the movie comes close to the power of classic tragedy.

A masterpiece of tragic science fiction and Gothic horror...

Any dolt could fill a movie with sickening stuff, and there's nothing scary, funny or interesting about what Cronenberg has done. It is just tedious and insulting. Get the swatter.

A classic combination of the romantic and the macabre is about to set moviegoers abuzz the rest of the summer. It`s The Fly, a remake; but it`s accomplished with a brisk and chilling new inspiration.

It is a fright film, a morality play about being devoured by one's work and, most powerfully, a sad, sad love story of doomed partners.

Only Cronenberg can get away with working out his raw phobias on screen while being poignantly witty and repulsively entertaining at the same time.