#bad horror

A press photo of George Kennedy in the truly AWFUL film Demonwarp. (1988)

Winged Death takes place in Africa (mostly near Uganda, though it ends in South Africa). It is, unsurprisingly, racist, but so is pretty much everything Lovecraft was ever involved in. More important for this rant, Winged Death asks the question, "What would be worse than death?" and answers, "Being turned into a fly."

I don't know about the rest of you, but if my choices were, "Die," or, "Get to live a bit longer, but as a fly," I think I'd happily take the fly option. I mean, at minimum I'd gain the ability to fly (kind of in the name), which is definitely better than dying. Surviving on rotting pieces of meat doesn't sound great, but that's because I'm currently a human. As a fly I'd probably think it was great!

And the worst part is that the story largely ignores the actually horrifying topic that provides the means for fly-ification: protracted, painful death by disease. See, in Winged Death there are these biting flies related to the tsetse fly that can give people this terrible fever. Death by the fever is a slow, involved process that sounds incredibly unpleasant and ends in paralysis. There's a cure, but since the disease is fairly obscure chances are if you get the fever then you're dead. The story touches on the horrifying nature of slowly dying from this fever, but its main focus is on the fact that if you die from the fever your consciousness is transferred to the fly that bit you (assuming the fly is still alive).

To make the wasted potential worse, the main character actually uses these flies as biological weapons! His final goal is to kill his rival, an entomologist back in North America, by sending him some infected flies labeled as harmless (which isn't the murder strategy I would have picked, but as a non-murderer I'm no expert). To get to that point, he spends a bunch of time experimenting on the locals, infecting people who trust him and then either letting them die or curing them as he pleases. He even uses the life-debt one of them owes him from curing the fever to catch more flies! That's horrifying! That's something the story could have worked with! But no, instead Winged Death frames becoming a fly as the real horror. In case you don't believe me, this is from the second paragraph of Winged Death:

"On the floor, uncomfortably evident amidst the stifling summer heat, was the body of a dead man—but this was not what the four were afraid of. Their glances wandered from the table, on which lay a curious assortment of things, to the ceiling overhead, across whose smooth whiteness a series of huge, faltering alphabetical characters had somehow been scrawled in ink; and every now and then Dr. Van Keulen would glance half-furtively at a worn leather blank-book which he held in his left hand. The horror of the four seemed about equally divided among the blank-book, the scrawled words on the ceiling, and a dead fly of peculiar aspect which floated in a bottle of ammonia on the table." (emphasis added by me)

For example:

Smiley

Terrible movie, absolutely horrendous, 0/10, would not recommend

But the design though

Terrifying

That stitched smile and eyes

Looking almost blank but still technically having features

A genuinely shitty slasher film like what they did with Winnie the Pooh. One where the plot takes things so seriously, but the production value is $100, shoestring, duct tape, and whatever crackheads they can get on a short notice.