If David Cronenberg’s The Fly was a sleek, grotesque, and tragic meditation on love, science, and the body’s inevitable betrayal, then The Fly II is the VHS you rent by mistake because the clerk at Blockbuster swore it was “kind of the same thing, but with more slime.” Spoiler: it’s not. It’s what happens when a studio executive hears the word “sequel” and immediately throws a jar of expired fly honey at a group of screenwriters, hoping they’ll lick it up and produce 100 minutes of content.
Yes, The Fly II is a film where Eric Stoltz plays the adult child of Jeff Goldblum’s Brundlefly, aging at warp speed, falling in love with a cute brunette (Daphne Zuniga), and eventually mutating into a giant bug with the grace of a man trying to unzip his pants in a hazmat suit.
The Birth Scene: Who Ordered the Larval Sac?
The movie begins with Geena Davis (well, not really—just a stand-in, because she wisely fled the production like it was a fumigation tent) giving birth to a larval sac. Yes, a big, gooey sack like someone left their groceries out in the sun too long. Inside? A human baby who grows up to be Eric Stoltz. It’s supposed to be horrifying, but it looks like something Jim Henson’s Creature Shop would’ve rejected for being “too gross for Muppets Tonight.”
Within five minutes, we realize the filmmakers are just going to replay moments from the first film, except dumber, stickier, and with less Goldblum charisma to distract us. It’s like eating a microwave burrito right after having filet mignon.
Enter Eric Stoltz: The Saddest Boy Wonder
Eric Stoltz, bless him, plays Martin Brundle—a boy who ages faster than Hollywood starlets’ marriages. At age three, he looks ten. At five, he looks twenty-five. By that math, by age twelve he should’ve been ready for retirement and golf with Clint Eastwood. But instead, he’s stuck in a corporate science daycare, raised by Anton Bartok (Lee Richardson), a CEO who thinks child-rearing means surveillance cameras and birthday parties hosted by armed guards.
Martin is a genius, but like every cinematic genius, he spends most of his time wandering sterile labs, frowning at telepods, and occasionally befriending dogs. Speaking of…
The Dog Scene: Ruin Christmas for Everyone
If there’s one thing The Fly II is infamous for, it’s the dog teleportation scene. Poor pupper goes in, comes out looking like a half-melted Beanie Baby left on a radiator. Martin visits the dog years later and, in a scene designed to make audiences cry but instead prompting them to yell, “WHY?!” at the screen, he euthanizes his beloved pet.
It’s supposed to build character. What it really builds is trauma. Kids who saw this on cable in 1989 are still in therapy, rocking back and forth every time someone mentions Eric Stoltz.
Romance in the Time of Goo
Because every monster movie needs a girlfriend doomed to regret her dating choices, Martin hooks up with Beth (Daphne Zuniga). Their romance begins with awkward lab flirting and escalates to telepod demonstrations and skinny dipping in the world’s least convincing science-fiction pond.
Beth is supportive, but let’s be real: when your boyfriend is sprouting insect genes and occasionally staring into the middle distance while clenching his jaw, maybe it’s time to swipe left. Instead, she sticks around until the bitter end, like a Hallmark heroine trapped in a Cronenberg fanfic written by someone who never read the first draft sober.
Body Horror: Discount Edition
The first Fly had Jeff Goldblum slowly mutating with horrifying realism—fingernails peeling, teeth falling out, skin sloughing like a rotisserie chicken. It was disgusting and moving at the same time.
The Fly II tries to replicate this but looks like they raided the “leftover slime” bin from Ghostbusters II. Stoltz sweats, twitches, and eventually bursts into a cocoon like an overcooked Hot Pocket. When he finally emerges, it’s not tragic. It’s a man in a rubber bug suit stomping around like he’s auditioning for Power Rangers.
Instead of “what does it mean to be human?” the vibe is more “who let the guy in the bug Halloween costume on set, and can someone please call pest control?”
Bartok: Worst Dad Ever
Lee Richardson’s Anton Bartok is the villain—though really, the villain is the screenplay. Bartok wants Martin to perfect the telepods so he can exploit them for profit. Because when you’re dealing with interdimensional science capable of rewriting DNA, the best use is…corporate synergy? It’s like if Elon Musk bought Jurassic Park and said, “Cool, but how do we monetize the T. rex farts?”
Bartok’s big plan is to wait until Martin mutates and then use his genetic goo for science. Spoiler: it does not end well for him. Unless you consider turning into a shriveled bug-blob and being tossed into a dog cage “well.”
The Password Is… “Dad.”
Climactic scenes usually hinge on something clever. Not here. The telepods are locked by a password. What is this password, you ask? “Dad.” That’s right—Martin, scientific wunderkind, sets the key to saving his own life as the emotional equivalent of “password123.” If only Bartok had tried “MommyIssues1” or “ILikeFlies69,” we could’ve ended this nightmare earlier.
Martin drags Bartok into the pods with him, gene-swaps, and emerges fully human again. Bartok, meanwhile, is turned into a crawling snot-beast doomed to live out his days in the same cage where the deformed dog once suffered. It’s poetic justice, but also the most depressing ASPCA commercial ever filmed.
The Ending: Buzzkill
The last shot of the movie is Bartok-creature staring at a fly crawling near its food bowl. The audience is supposed to feel a shiver of irony. Instead, we just feel pity—for the dog, for the actors, and for ourselves, who wasted nearly two hours watching a film that replaced Cronenberg’s philosophical horror with monster wrestling and puppy murder.
Dark Humor Takeaways
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The Fly II proves not all genes are dominant. Some are recessive, like “good writing” and “subtlety.”
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Eric Stoltz deserved better than spending an entire movie looking like a sad, sweaty caterpillar.
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The telepods are the real villains: first they made Goldblum vomit on donuts, now they ruin Christmas for dog lovers everywhere.
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Beth is the kind of girlfriend who sees her man sprout bug mandibles and still thinks, “I can fix him.”
Final Verdict
The Fly II is what happens when you try to microwave Cronenberg’s leftovers. It’s gooey, undercooked, and gives you food poisoning. It mistakes gore for tragedy, melodrama for romance, and Nazi-level dog cruelty for emotional depth.
The first Fly asked big questions: what is humanity? What is love in the face of decay? The Fly II asks smaller ones: why does the elfstone prop from Elves look more convincing than this bug suit? And who let Dan Haggerty keep his whiskey flask on set?
At 105 minutes, it feels longer than Martin’s entire accelerated lifespan. Watch it only if you’re a masochist, an Eric Stoltz completist, or someone who thinks puppies had it too easy in the ’80s.
