Something called Nasho was scrapped—which apparently meant that when I was old enough I would no longer have to serve in the army—I was sure Australia’s enemies would have a field day without me there to stop them heroically. And there was a war in a place called Laos, which apparently didn’t have anything to do with the one I had read about in Vietnam.
There were the wonders through the microscope, all manner of wriggling things, kaleidoscopic patterns and unrecognisable familiar objects and it was all downright scary to think this world of monsters was all around us but too small to see. The greatest horror was the day I caught a housefly and had a close look. It’s remains to this day the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen—far worse than the way the depicted it in the eponymous movie.
Despite that, The Fly was a wonderfully ghastly little film. David (then called Al) Hedison is experimenting with matter transference when a fly enters his system. He ends up with the head and foreleg of the fly, while there’s a fly buzzing around with his head and arm. He tries to hide while he looks for the answer, but his wife (Patricia Owens) finds out in a shocking scene in which her screaming face is seen in the multi-faceted view of a fly. When it is all hopeless, she helps him kill himself, crushing the affected parts in a giant metal press to hide the evidence of his folly. Vincent Price and Herbert Marshall grace the film; Price as the wise old head who told him so, and Marshall as the policeman who investigates and arrests wifey for murder. Her explanation lands her in a mental institution, stopping people from killing flies, but out in the garden, a startling discovery is made, that solves the mystery but deepens the problem. The final scene is unforgettable.
