The Fly (1986 Film) - Deleted/alternate Scenes

Deleted/alternate Scenes

After filming ended early in 1986, a rough cut of The Fly was shown to Fox executives, who were very impressed. A rough cut was then previewed at Toronto's Uptown Theatre in the Spring of that year. Due to a strong audience reaction, the graphic and infamous "monkey-cat" sequence was cut from the film to make it easier for audiences to maintain more sympathy for Brundle's character. Another preview screening was subsequently held at the Fox lot in Los Angeles, and this version featured the "Butterfly Baby" coda. As before, the screening results dictated that the scene be cut.

As with most of David Cronenberg's movies, The Fly was tightly edited to maintain a strong pace and to downplay the gore. The final cut runs a brisk 95 minutes, and although very few scenes were cut, many others were trimmed down. The DVD and Blu-ray editions of the film feature both the shooting script and a great deal of deleted, extended and alternate footage which had never been seen before.

The most notable deleted/alternate scenes include:

• Second interview: a short scene that features Veronica Quaife conducting a videotaped interview with Seth Brundle (after his superhuman exercise seen in the completed film), in which he mistakenly theorizes that being teleported has somehow improved him (a slightly different version of this scene appears in The Fly II, which contains alternate takes and dialogue that was deleted from the workprint version that appears on the DVD).

• Monkey-Cat: a legendary sequence in which a desperate Brundle (in a transitional makeup stage that appears only in this scene), uses the Telepods to merge an alley cat and a baboon (the same baboon that Brundle successfully teleported earlier in the film) together in an attempt to find a cure for his condition. However, the resulting "monkey-cat" creature comes out of the receiving Telepod terribly deformed and in unendurable pain, and attacks Brundle, who ends up beating the two-headed creature to death with a metal pipe to end its misery. The sequence goes on to show the disturbed Brundle scaling the wall of his lab up to the roof, only to feel a sharp pain in his left side (specifically, in the hernia-like bulge seen in the final cut of the film when Brundle first demonstrates his wall-crawling powers). He accidentally slips off the roof, slides down the wall, lands on a metal awning, and watches as a small, fly-like leg emerges from his torso. Horrified by this new appendage, Brundle amputates it with his teeth.

Brundle's motivation for fusing the two animals together was intended to be somewhat ambiguous in the context of the sequence, which featured a "test run" for Brundle's fusion "cure" seen at the end of the movie. Thematically, the point of the scene was that Brundle was trying to find some kind of cure for his rapidly deteriorating condition, but was clearly losing his sanity at the same time. The end of the sequence also revealed exactly what the hernia-like bulge on Brundle's torso was, as well as revealing the final fate of the surviving baboon, story points that are both left unresolved in the final cut.

As noted, this sequence was included in the rough cut shown at the Toronto preview screening. The audience had a strong reaction, with at least one person allegedly throwing up. The general consensus from the preview audience was that Brundle was being cruel to the animals (and thus the scene played as being gratuitous, which was not the filmmakers' intent), and, as a result, they lost sympathy for him for the duration of the film. The scene was cut, and remained lost for nearly 20 years. For the 2005 DVD, the scene was restored from the original negative (which was editorially conformed to the workprint version), with tracked-in sound effects and music taken from the completed film.

• After amputating the insect leg, the script additionally called for Brundle to encounter a homeless woman in the alley, on whose face he would vomit and whom he would subsequently consume. However, this segment was written out of the movie before filming, even though an actress had already been hired to play the baglady. The scripted sequence appears on the DVD.

• Butterfly Baby; the film's deleted epilogue was shot four different ways (all of which can be seen on the DVD). In the version of the scene that was originally scripted (and previewed for the Los Angeles test audience), Veronica Quaife is seen in bed with Stathis Borans (having married him) some time after Seth Brundle's death. She awakens from another nightmare in which she gives birth to Brundle's child, and Stathis reassures her that she is safe, and that the baby she is now carrying (having presumably aborted Brundle's) is his. Veronica then falls back to sleep, and she is now dreaming of a beautiful human baby with butterfly wings hatching from a cocoon and flying off towards a distant light source.

The other filmed versions of the epilogue

• Veronica in bed with Stathis (much the same as the version that was previewed), but without her being pregnant. Instead, Stathis reassures her that "there's no baby". She then falls back to sleep and has the butterfly-baby dream.
• Veronica waking up alone and in her own bed, then falling back to sleep and having the butterfly-baby dream. In this version, she is clearly still pregnant with Brundle's baby.
• Veronica waking up alone and in her own bed, then having the butterfly-baby dream. In this version, she is not visibly pregnant (thus leaving the ending ambiguous).

The epilogue was intended as an upbeat bookend for Veronica's earlier maggot-baby dream, and to give the surviving characters a more hopeful ending. However, the coda did not fare well with the preview audience, since they were too stunned by the film's climax to focus on the coda, which raised a number of questions. Further, due to the dynamics between the characters that evolved during filming, the chemistry between Brundle and Ronnie proved so strong that no one wanted to see her end up with Stathis Borans (which is one reason why the alternate, Borans-less versions of the coda were shot). The filmmakers also agreed that the story should end with Brundle's mercy-killing at Veronica's hands, despite the unanswered questions about Veronica's unborn child that would be raised by the deletion of the epilogue.

The climax of the film also went through several incarnations in the various drafts of the script before the final version was filmed:

In one early version of the ending, Veronica is unconscious after Brundlefly throws her into Telepod 1. When the Brundlepod emerges from the prototype telepod, the raging and mortally wounded creature crawls toward the injured Stathis Borans, who manages to grab a loose wire jutting from the telepod/human/fly-hybrid creature's back and jams it into an electrical socket. The Brundlepod is liquified by the electricity.

A later version of the scene is nearly identical, except that the Brundlething crawls toward Stathis (whether it wants to attack him or is just desperate for help is left ambiguous) and then dies.

In the version of the script that appears on the 2005 DVD, Veronica is conscious during the final scene, and when the Brundlething emerges from the receiving telepod and crawls toward her, she aims Stathis' shotgun at it, but the creature ends up dying at her feet. Eventually, this was slightly changed to the mercy-killing seen in the completed film.