Francois, who has always loved Helene from afar, is far more concerned about her well-being than the loss of his brother; he continues to treat her patiently and with great affection, even as she refuses to explain why she committed the crime.

Whatever the explanation, it seems to have left her a bit addled. She doesn't even seem all that upset. She politely confesses to police inspector Charas (Marshall), offers him some coffee, then, in some kind of trance, follows a buzzing fly across the room before confirming that it's not the one she wants.

Days pass, with Helene under medical care while the inspector decides what to do with her. It turns out that the fly she's searching for is a very special one, with a white leg and head. It also turns out that when she pressed the button that pulped her hubby, she was only following his last wish.

At long last, she agrees to explain herself, telling the tale of Andre's last days and an experiment in matter transportation that went disastrously awry.

Another inventor goes buggy

This original version of George Langelaan's short story was considered a minor classic for decades, until David Cronenberg's very different re-imagining of the basic premise came along and blew it out of the water. The Cronenberg is certainly more powerful, but is this version any good?

The best answer is that it's stately. Clavell's screenplay preserves the deliberate pacing of the short story, hinting at awfulness from the very beginning but withholding the weirdness long past the point where a modern-day audience would have bolted. Helene doesn't begin to tell her story until almost half an hour has passed. That's a third of the film. By the time Andre uses himself as test subject, we're close to the one-hour mark. Up to that point, the overall mood is not suspense so much as disturbed civility. Everybody's terribly decent and soft-spoken about everything. At no point is the saintly Francois even upset at Helene for reducing his brother to a fine paste. He just wants to make sure she's all right.

Along the way we also get '50s paranoia, including yet another of the era's lines to the effect that there are some things man should not mess with. This comes from Helene. Andre counters this quite adequately (albeit by invoking television, among other things), before undergoing his radical body enhancement. Granted, he changes his mind afterward and thinks his invention needs to be destroyed, but by then he has big gold compound eyes, a claw for a hand and a reason to be upset. A more impartial observer would probably point out the same lesson Jeff Goldblum's Seth Brundle could have used, decades later, which is that scientists developing matter transmission systems really do need to make sure their work is conducted in clean conditions.

Clavell, later famous as the author of Shogun, fills the script with any number of moments laughable to today's ears, which likely provoked titters along with the creeps even then. The classic moment, which everybody who sees it remembers, is the fly with the human head screeching, "Help me! Help meeee!" That's a goodie. That's the money moment, and it delivers exactly as intended. But coming immediately after that, the inspector puts the poor thing out of its misery with a rock, and Francois makes the immortal declaration: "You committed murder just as much as Helene did! You killed a fly with a human head! She killed a human with a fly head!"