But since we don’t have any political horrors to present you with, we’re going with the next best thing: creepy insect monsters! No, not Republicans, actual creepy insect monsters.

Ever the maverick (but I’m willing to sell out my maverick tendencies in order to pander to the lowest, brain-dead, mouth-breathing, primitive fucktard common demoninator – but you better believe I’m still going to claim I’m a maverick!), my selection for tonight’s feature is related to a bug movie, but is not, in fact, a bug movie. Curse of the Fly follows the third generation of the tragic Delambre family, still trying to carry on granddad’s legacy and finish work on a functional teleporter.

Henri Delambre, a previously unmentioned Delambre and brother to Philippe from Return of the Fly, and his son Albert live in London. His eldest son, Martin, lives in Canada. And they travel back and forth by teleport. Problem is, although they have been very careful to keep bugs from getting into the booth with them, the teleportation process causes radiation burns and cellular destabilization. Martin has to take regular injections to keep himself from melting, and Henri is on his last legs.

Martin, tired of the secluded life of a research scientist, takes the first random woman he meets running around the park as his wife. Patricia turns out to be an escapee from a local mental institution. She was locked up for having a mental meltdown before her first concert piano performance, and her escape has drawn Inspector Ronet snooping around Martin’s mansion, where Henri has recently teleported in to welcome Patricia into the family.

Sensing something fishy, Ronet visits Inspector Charas (the policeman from the original flick), and is let in on the secret of what’s going on. He suspects Patricia may be in great danger, but she’s already stumbled upon Judith, Martin’s first wife. Except now Judith is a melty-faced mutant, kept in the mansion’s stables with a couple of other melty-faced mutants who used to be Martin’s assistants before they were teleported and turned into monsters. Wan and Tai, Martin’s hench-couple, kill Judith after she attacks Tai, and use the teleporter to disintegrate her. Martin and Henri realize everything is going to Hell in a handbasket, and teleport the other two mutants to London for Albert to deal with, and deal with them he does. Going berserk, he hacks them and his entire lab to pieces with an axe, unbeknownst to Martin, who is preparing to send Henri along to London to escape from the police. Ronet arrives just in time to save Patricia from a quickly-melting Martin, who crumbles to a skeleton as Ronet and Patricia limp away from the final ruins of the Delambre family.

This flick was unavailable in the States for along time, but if you’ve ever read anything about it, you’ve probably read that it’s the best of the original series. You read right. While there is no actual fly action in this installment, it follows the Delambres to their final, grim, and disturbing demise.

The movie brilliantly tackles the theme of morality in research science – do you put the good of a few before the good of the many? How many people would Martin and Henri sacrifice to the teleporter before Albert took the story public or they wound up killing themselves chasing a scientific white rabbit? Is melting your wife worth cheap shipping and not having to wait two weeks to get your order from Amazon.com?

The obsession of the family that ultimately brings about their demise makes for some seriously chilling scenes, most notably Albert’s breakdown leading to the disintegration of dear ol’ dad. When Martin sends the mutants through to London, you see Albert starting to slip, and when he returns from the storeroom with an axe, the look on his face says it all. You don’t need to see the hacking and mutilating to know what’s going to happen next, and Michael Graham works wonders with the unfortunately small role he’s given. You’d think the member of the family who’s actually having a moral crisis would be given a little more screen time. God knows I would gladly have gone without some of Patricia’s endless skulking around Martin’s house for a few more minutes of Albert.

And when Martin, who has turned off the radio phone to end Albert’s protests about their work and about sending Henri back to London, only to have inadvertently killed his own father because Albert couldn’t tell him he’d destroyed the London terminal, Albert just drops the handset and slouches out of the destroyed room (which a camera pan reveals to the audience for the first time, finally explaining Albert’s having a fit about teleporting Henri). Now, when I was watching this flick, my kids were running around the house, and those readers with kids know what a mighty distraction that is to movie watching. Even with the furor of parenthood roaring in my ears, this scene sent an honest-to-Cthulhu chill up my spine. Michael Graham gives a greater performance in thirty seconds with his fucking shoulders than most actors give in their entire career.

Granted, the flick isn’t perfect. The mutant makeup effects are about on par with Troughton-era “Doctor Who” (especially Yvette Rees as Wan, with that godawful eye makeup trying to make her look Oriental – it’s so fucking bad it’s all you can look at whenever she’s onscreen and totally ruining a character that should have been menacing and scary), and the pacing during the first half of the movie is pretty slow. As I mentioned before, we could have done with less Patricia lurking about the mansion and more Albert being awesome. All in all, a small couple of gripes in what is otherwise a fantastic movie. This thing manages to take two previous movies’ worth of fun-but-silly science-fiction schlock and turn it into something truly atmospheric and horrifying. Director Don Sharp was a member of the old Hammer stable, and it shows, taking a thin premise full of cheese and turning it into a full and satisfying gothic banquet. In fact, add a few gallons of slime and this bears a pretty close resemblance to something David Cronenberg would make.