What actually happens
The first baboon has a bad time
Seth Brundle, a brilliant and eccentric scientist, meets a science journalist named Veronica Quaife, who goes by Ronnie, and takes her back to his home laboratory to show off his telepods, two chambers that move an object from one to the other instantly. Ronnie agrees to keep it secret in exchange for the exclusive story, and she starts recording his work. The pods handle objects fine, but living tissue comes out wrecked, and a baboon is turned inside-out during a test. Seth and Ronnie start dating, and that gives Seth an idea about how flesh works, so he reprograms the computer. A second baboon makes it through intact. Ronnie then rushes off to deal with her editor, Stathis Borans, who is threatening to publish the story without her. Seth, certain she is going back to Stathis, teleports himself, and a fly goes into the pod with him.
Reading this instead of watching it is the correct decision. Scaredy Cat makes that decision automatic, for free.
Arm wrestling with a side order of mutation
Seth steps out of the receiving pod looking fine, and he and Ronnie make up. Soon he has more strength, more stamina and a lot more confidence, and he decides the teleporter has purified him. Ronnie notices his personality changing, and some bristly hairs growing out of a wound on his back. Seth turns arrogant and violent and keeps trying to talk Ronnie into teleporting herself. When she refuses, he goes to a bar, wins an arm-wrestling match and breaks his opponent's arm badly enough that the bone comes through. Back at the warehouse with a woman named Tawny, he tries to pressure her into the pods as well, until Ronnie stops him, and Seth throws them both out. Then his fingernails start falling off. He checks the telepod computer, finds the fly, and works out that the computer merged him with it at the genetic level when it got two lifeforms in one pod.
Brundlefly develops a table manner
Over several weeks Seth loses body parts and looks less human, and he tells Ronnie he is turning into something he calls Brundlefly. He vomits digestive enzymes over his meals to break them down, he can cling to walls and ceilings, and he can feel his reasoning and compassion going. He installs a fusion program in the telepod computer, hoping to dilute the fly genes with human ones. Ronnie finds out she is pregnant, cannot tell whether the baby was conceived before or after the accident, and has a nightmare about giving birth to a giant maggot. Seth warns her to stay away, so she has Stathis find a doctor who will perform an abortion that night. Seth overhears, kidnaps Ronnie and pleads with her to keep the baby, since it may be what is left of him. Stathis breaks into the lab with a shotgun, and Seth stops him with corrosive vomit.
The telepod door is not a good roommate
This is the scene to brace for, and it comes near the end. Seth plans to use the telepods to fuse himself, Ronnie and the unborn baby into one being. As he drags her toward a pod, she accidentally rips off his jaw, which sets off his final transformation into the full insect-human creature, and he sheds what is left of his human skin. He locks Ronnie in the first pod and gets in another. The wounded Stathis fires the shotgun at the cables connecting Ronnie's pod to the computer, and she gets out. The damage makes the second pod malfunction, and it activates just as Seth is stepping through the door, so he is fused with a piece of the door and other parts. The prototype pod still receives the result, and Seth falls out onto the floor. It is grotesque, and what comes after it is the sad part.
The ending, explained
Seth crawls across the floor to Ronnie, who has picked up Stathis's shotgun. He asks her without speaking to end his misery by aiming the barrel of the gun at his own head. She hesitates, then shoots him, crying, and drops to her knees in despair. Seth is dead, Ronnie is alive, and Stathis is wounded. The ending is sad.
The post-credits ruling
There is no post-credits scene. You can leave when the credits start.
✓ Spoiled safelyDog status: fine, no dog dies, though a baboon has a bad time.
Questions people ask at 1am
Is The Fly scary?
Yes, The Fly is a 7 out of 10, with high dread and a lot of body horror. There are jump scares, but the real fear is watching Seth Brundle's body change one piece at a time over the course of the movie.
How does The Fly end?
Seth's final teleport fuses him with parts of the telepod. He crawls to Ronnie and silently asks her to shoot him, and she does, in tears. It is a sad ending.
Does the dog die in The Fly?
No dog dies in The Fly. The animal that dies is a baboon, which is turned inside-out in an early experiment, and a deleted scene on some discs adds a cat and a monkey.
Is there a post-credits scene in The Fly?
No. The Fly has no post-credits scene, so you can leave when the credits start.
What is Brundlefly in The Fly?
Brundlefly is the name Seth Brundle gives himself once he realizes the telepod computer merged his genes with the fly's when they went through together. He gradually becomes a human-insect hybrid.
