13 Days of First-Time Frights: The Fly

13 Days of First-Time Frights is a series of reviews for October 2019 where Douglas Laman, in the spirit of Halloween, watches and writes about thirteen horror movies he's never seen before. These reviews will be posted each Tuesday and Thursday as well as the last three Wednesdays of October 2019.

Entry #4: The Fly

Scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is working on something quite impressive. It's not something he's willing to share with just anyone, but he does end up bringing reporter Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) back to his workspace to check out what he's managed to create. Turns out, Brundle has created a revolutionary teleportation device in the form of two telepods. It's still in need of tweaks so that it can properly transport human tissue but it's already transporting clothes from one place to the next without issue, surely humans can't be far behind. Veronica Quaife begins to chronicle Brundle's trial and error exercises in getting this machine to work properly and in the process the two of them being to fall in love.

Take An Amiable Trip To Texas With David Byrne In True Stories

I've managed to review a bunch of low-key movies lately but none of them are as laidback as David Byrne's True Stories. The lone feature film directorial effort from Byrne, who is most famous for being a founding member of Talking Heads, explores the lives of the inhabitants of a small Texas town by the name of Virgil with all the urgency of a tranquil Sunday stroll. Such a style of pacing is a perfect fit for Byrne, who, in the role of The Narrator, wants the viewer to have time to soak in all the finer details of this town and its inhabitants. This characters fascination with Virgil, Texas results in a delightfully unique entry in the canon of Texas cinema.

Top Gun May Have The Need For Speed, But It Also Needed Some Energy And Fun

1984's Risky Business was what put Tom Cruise on the map, but two years later, his position on that map as a movie star of note was cemented with Top Gun. A box office and pop culture phenomenon that's still impacting cinema to this day, Top Gun was the film that solidified the kind of crowdpleaser action blockbusters that Tom Cruise is still most famous for headlining in the modern-day world. But is there more to this Tony Scott directed movie than just a popular Kenny Loggins song? Sadly, in my viewpoint after watching this one for the first time, there really isn't. Top Gun is instead one of those hugely influential movies that's far worse than the motion pictures it ended up influencing.

Ya Can't Help But Believe In Aliens

James Cameron is about to spend the next eight years immersed in the world of Pandora creating four Avatar sequels, which, considering they just cast Cliff Curtis in a major role in said sequels, means it looks like these Avatar follow-ups are actually finally happening after nearly a decade of development. Cameron himself is no stranger to sequels having started his entire directorial career with Pirhana 2: The Spawning, a cheapie 1981 horror movie he directed with Ovidio G. Assonitis. A decade later he would helm Terminator 2: Judgement Day which is widely considered to be one of the best blockbusters of the 1990's. In between those two sequels though came Aliens, a direct follow-up to Ridley Scott's earlier Alien film.

I'm Blue (Velvet) Da Ba Dee Da Ba Daa

The unusual seems to just come natural to David Lynch. His movies are world-renowned at this point for having incredibly idiosyncratic visual touches to them and extended dream-like sequences while his 1982 movie The Elephant Man (previously the only David Lynch movie I'd seen) concentrated on a man whose physical appearance was so different from society it caused him to be ostracized from the rest of the world and treated unfairly like a freak. For his 1986 feature Blue Velvet, Lynch once again embraces the unorthodox to create incredible and distinctive cinema, the kind that really feels like it could only come from the mind of Lynch himself.

Kurt Russell And A Go-For-Broke Attitude Shine In Big Trouble In Little China

To look at the career of director John Carpenter in an in-depth manner is to realize that this guy was nothing if not tonally versatile in the work he produced. The creepy horror film Halloween launched his vocation as a filmmaker into the stratosphere, while the 1982 effort The Thing returned Carpenter to the horror genre with plenty of newfound science-fiction elements to keep things fresh. John Carpenter's 1986 feature Big Trouble In Little China is a bold departure of either of those previously mentioned movies in a myriad of ways, not only in the way it constantly uses Eastern and Chinese imagery but also in its more zany light-hearted atmosphere.