(1989)

Submitted by Julio M

Short pooper:
Martin (Eric Stoltz) undergoes a full transformation into a fly-like humanoid creature, after being recaptured by Bartok (Lee Richardson) and his henchmen. He goes on a rampage, gruesomely killing and maiming many of them, and, with the help of Beth (Daphne Zuniga), he forces Bartok into one of the reactivated telepods and does the gene-swapping process he originally intended to do, to cure himself off his mutation. Martin is restored back to normal, while Bartok devolves into a deformed humanoid that is imprisoned in a dungeon of the Company.

Longer version:
Researching for a potential cure for his mysterious condition, Martin comes across a solution that would involve him getting into one of the two telepods with another living, healthy subject, and each other swapping their genes, but decides against proceeding with it as he realizes it would involve condemning another person to a horrible fate.

After getting intimate with Martin in his purportedly private space, Beth finds herself suddenly locked out of the area she traditionally had clearance for; Scorby (Garry Chalk), the sadistic and scornful Chief of Security for Bartok Industries, provides her with a copy of a video that turns out to be a secret recording of Martin and Beth having sex, of which she bitterly complains to Martin. Enraged, he tears apart the apartment until discovering the camera and realizes he had been spied on, the whole time. Looking for further answers, he reaches the Records’ Room, where he finds and sees, for the first time, the recordings showing his father Seth (Jeff Goldblum) as he started undergoing the fateful “Brundlefly” transformation. Bartok catches him and admits his true intentions towards Martin: to groom him in an eventual, inevitable transformation, similar to Seth’s, into a humanoid creature that would provide Bartok Industries with priceless, revolutionary genetic research material and profit.

As his mutant genes start to manifest and trigger the transformation, feeling dejected, Martin flees the Company, fighting off Scorby and a few other henchmen in the process. When everyone gathers at the Bay where Martin kept the telepods, they discover they are unusable by anyone else, as Martin placed a computer virus on them that, if a wrong password is typed to unlock the program, would erase it completely. Bartok orders a full-scale manhunt to recapture Martin. Meanwhile, Martin reconnects with a shocked Beth, explains to her what is happening, and convinces her to take him to see Stathis Borans (John Getz), who is now a recluse and embittered alcoholic, still traumatized by the death of Veronica (briefly played here by Saffron Henderson) and his last run-in with Seth.

Borans, with some coercion from both Beth and Martin, does admit that the solution only lies within the telepods and allows them to take his own vehicle to avoid detection, before ordering them to leave him alone. Their getaway lands them in a motel, where Martin’s transformation happens at a dramatically accelerated pace and overwhelms Beth. Fearing there is nothing else to do, she gives in and contacts Bartok; a team comes to pick them up, by which point, Martin is already half-engulfed in a cocoon and almost looking nothing like a human, but he never reveals the password. They are both brought back to the Company, where Martin -now a full cocoon- is put under observation and Beth is decontaminated, interrogated and held against her will.

Eventually, the cocoon breaks and out comes Martin, fully mutated into a fly-like humanoid monster, very much like it happened to Seth. He scouts the facility, bound to follow on the cure idea he had originally reneged on. Many of Bartok’s henchmen come across his path, and he disposes of them in gruesome ways -maiming them or spraying them with his fly vomit-. Unstopped, he reaches the Bay where Bartok was holding Beth hostage, gets the upper hand against Scorby, snatches Bartok and forces him to type the password on the computer -which turns out to be DAD-, after which he drags him into one of the telepods. From inside, he uses Bartok’s hand to signal to Beth to activate the gene-swapping sequence, despite Bartok’s desperate pleas not to, and she complies. Martin and Bartok are successfully teleported from one pod to the other.

As they emerge on the other side, Beth tends to a now-healthy-looking, back-to-normal Martin, while Bartok comes out looking like a hideous, slithering humanoid being. The movie ends with the Bartok-creature confined to the same observation pen where that dog Martin, as a child, lost to a failed teleportation attempt was placed in -and which he later euthanized, to stop the animal’s suffering-; it crawls towards a bowl of goop with a housefly sitting on the edge.

01 hours 45 minutes