Jake Busey. Julian Lennon. Martin Brundle.

It's tough to have to live in the shadow of your father, especially when your father is as influential and talented as Gary Busey, John Lennon, and Seth Brundle are.

Well, not so much the relationship of Martin to Seth, as it is the comparison of The Fly II to The Fly (review here). While David Cronenberg's masterpiece is revered as just that (as it rightly deserves), the Fly II represents the worst kind of sequel: the moneymaking rehash. However, 20th Century Fox figured it deserved the same 2-disc collector's edition treatment as its forebear (both being re-released, no doubt, to coincide with Halloween and the release of Cronenberg's A History of Violence), and so thus it sends The Fly II back out onto shelves where, honestly, it just doesn't need to be.

In an operating theater owned by the shadowy Bartok Corporation, the folks who funded Seth Brundle in the first movie, Veronica Quaife (played this time, briefly, by Geena Davis lookalike Saffron Henderson) gives screaming birth to a leathery cocoon fathered by Seth Brundle. Horrified, Stathis Borans (John Getz) looks on in horror and impotence as Ronnie dies and the cocoon is scalpeled open to reveal a rather healthy, normal looking baby. Flash forward 11 months, and Brundle's illegitimate son Martin has already grown to the size of a four-year-old and a mental capacity far beyond that. He meets Anton Bartok (who positively drips evil, but more on that later), who uses parlor tricks to establish himself as a father figure to the rapidly developing Martin. Martin, as the Bartok scientists tell him, is afflicted with the same degenerative disease that killed his father and thus grows at a ridiculously rapid rate, a growth slowed only by his frequent injections of alleged medication.

On Martin's fifth birthday, he now inhabits the body of a man in his early twenties (and played by Eric Stoltz), thus affording him some extra special treatment from Mr. Bartok: he is moved out of his laboratory "cell" into a plush condo, and he is given a job trying to finish his father's work with the telepods. There, he meets the cute Beth Logan (played by Daphne Zuniga...insert "Drewish princess" joke here), whom he has a whirlwind romance with. Of course, seeing as how this is The Fly II, their love is tested when Martin begins to show some of the same flesh-peeling, hair-shedding symptoms of his father before him. Bartok, it turns out, had merely been injecting Martin with a placebo so that he could monitor his surrogate son's degeneration (because he's, you know, evil).

Where does one even begin with a sequel so misguided? My biggest beef with it is the complete loss of subtlety from the prequel. The Fly was a true horror story about a man's destruction at the hands of his fickle mistress named science. The Fly II, while still holding onto this theme to a degree, instead decides to simplify things by adding a true "villain" to the picture in the form of Bartok, who's so damn eye-rollingly evil it throws most of the picture's credibility out the window. He establishes trust with Martin just so that he can get in closer to watch Martin's inevitable "rebirth," which coupled with Bartok's completion of the telepods will lead to them essentially "ruling the world" (ummm...how?). He takes a happy golden retriever and unsuccessfully teleports it, turning it into a mangled Muppet (who looks like Falcor's retarded brother), then keeps the suffering animal locked up in a filthy cell. He lies to Martin, holds his girlfriend captive against her will, and sacrifices dozens of lives. I'm sure that if the movie had been ten minutes longer, Mick Garris would've thrown in a scene where Bartok kicks one-legged puppies, sets fire to orphanages, and eats a kitten because he can. This sort of ham-fisted good/evil interplay, while certainly not out of place in other movies, simply comes across as dumb here. Maybe we could've explored more of Martin's character (as it stands, he comes across as just a nice guy in shitty circumstances), or seen how he felt about his father, or maybe more how his father's genetic mutation effects him outside of the rather quick transition he goes through.

When the smoke clears from that transition, Martin is reborn as a creature that looks as much like a fly as I look like a hot dog cart. While the hulking, semi-reptilian creature design is cool, and would've been a great addition to a spacefaring sci-fi epic, it simply doesn't look like a fly. I don't quite understand it, as Chris Walas once again designed the creature (as well as directed the movie), but any resemblance to the original, kickass Brundlefly is completely gone. Whereas the original was lithe and acrobatic, the second time around it's slow, lumbering, and unconvincing, a statement which can represent either the creatures or the movies as a whole. Despite being a mere nine minutes longer, The Fly II has well worn out its welcome by the time its moderately cool final act scuttles along, with Martin losing it and killing Bartok security personnel at an astonishing rate. He breaks their spines, tosses them under descending elevators, and sprays their faces with acid. It's messy fun, but it represents only a tiny portion of the movie, which bores the viewer almost every step of the way.

The DVD treatment also doesn't hold up to The Fly's release either. The transfer, while decently colored and compression-free, is bursting at the seams with print damage. Nicks, hairs, scratches, burns...you name it, it's on display here. Audio is decent, with the same options as The Fly (DTS, Dolby 5.1, Dolby 2.0), but somehow not quite as room-filling or bombastic. Extras also seem as if Fox was trying way too hard to get this puppy across two discs. Disc One contains a commentary track, a rather amusing deleted scene (if you hate kids, you'll agree with me), and a cheesy alternate ending. Disc Two has a few featurettes, still galleries, an electronic press kit, and storyboard comparisons. A welcome addition is AMC's rather nice documentary The Fly Papers, which gives a retrospective on the whole series all the way back to 1958. Seeing as how AMC has gone off the deep end in recent years (remember when the AMC stood for American Movie Classics?), the Leonard Nimoy-narrated piece comes across as wholly pleasant and well-done, as well as far more exciting than the other featurettes, or the film itself for that matter.