Continuing the week of Halloween Smackdown (and classic Halloween costume favorites), we're bringing in the Misfits Of Science. No, not the shortlived 1980s TV show, but characters like Frankenstein's Monster, Mister Hyde and Seth Brundle - The classic idea of science overreaching, ignoring morality with terrible consequences that happen to include a monster we can all root for - I mean, against. Well, kind of. What happens when witchcraft comes up against something that spits in the face of all that's natural?

Yup, we're splitting the poll today, giving Mutations and Creations their own chances to duke it out with Witches, not only because Frankenstein's Monster is a different beast than Mister Hyde in many ways, but also because we're thinking that maybe the completely unnatural creations have some kind of edge over the mutated, in some entirely imaginary "What if magic is more effective against that which is naturally supposed to exist" sense. But what do we know about magic? We lost track of The Lord Of The Rings movies long before Cate Blanchett showed up.

Tomorrow: The final showdown! Today's winner versus the ghouls you've been expecting all along! Until then, the poll remains open until midnight PST tonight, so vote vote vote.

Risky Business is reporting that Cronenberg is being backed by Fox to direct, and potentially write, a remake of his classic body-horror flick The Fly.

There is no one who does trippy "your body is deceiving you" horror quite like Cronenberg, and we're so glad to have him back. But fair warning Hollywood, replacing Jeff Goldblum will take some doing.

Even when teleportation works properly, there are tremendous risks. You can get a smirking Hayden Christensen popping up on top of every world landmark, chased by a bleach-blond Samuel L. Jackson. And that's an example of successful teleportation. Here's what happens when it goes wrong:

Star Trek: Gosh, are there transporter accidents in Star Trek? I can't actually think of any. Oh wait. Yeah, there are a few. Just a handful, maybe. If you've got big hands. Most notably, the transporter splits Kirk into two Kirks: one passive, one aggressive. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Stonn Q. Vulcan beams up along with someone else, and they get scrambled into a mess that doesn't live long OR prosper. (And according to the book, Kirk also has a wife who dies in a transporter accident.) In TNG, Reg Barclay has a transporter mishap that makes him even more annoying than usual. And Ro Laren and Geordi get turned ghosty. In DS9, the transporter zaps Sisko and Bashir back in time, forcing Sisko to pretend to be a civil rights leader. On Voyager, the transporter makes Seven Of Nine's Borg implants have sex with the Doctor's holo-emitter. Also, Tuvok and Neelix have the oposite of Kirk's original malfunction, and get merged into one super-passive-aggressive entity. There are like 10,000 more of them, but you get the picture.

Tron. As we pointed out a while back, Tron is about a teleportation experiment, and it's designed to teleport from point A to point B. But instead, it disassembles Jeff Bridges and zap him into the passive-aggressive video-game world. Oops.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One of the Turtles' main frenemies is the one-eyed giant alligator, Leatherhead, who got adopted by the alien Utroms. Stranded on Earth, Leatherhead is constantly building Transmat devices to take him back to the Utrom homeworld. And they're constantly going horribly wrong, in the comics and in the TV show. One transmat device blows up in Leatherhead's face. Another one simply materializes three Utroms, who shoot him. A third transmat device generates energy that lures a whole gang of Triceratons to Leatherhead's secret hideout. Poor Leatherhead!

Savage Planet. This is possibly the absolute sickest teleportation disaster ever, from the indie movie Savage Planet. A whole bunch of intrepid explorers are zapping themselves to an alien world, and they put just a wee bit too much stress on the system. So one of them comes through missing a big chunk of his inner torso. (Warning: video is totally gross.)

Adam Strange loved the Zeta Beam teleportation mechanism, which zapped him to and from the planet Rann — until it scooped out his eyes like cantaloupe balls. The original Green Lantern, Alan Scott, had the same thing happen to him, but he only lost one eye. I'm noticing a theme of teleportation mishaps and missing eyes, what with Leatherhead and all.

Ultimate Fantastic Four. In the original Stan Lee version, the Fantastic Four get transformed into lovable freaks when they go up in a rocket to beat the Soviets into space or something. But in the Ultimate reboot, they build a teleportation machine to send matter into a parallel universe. By accident, the four of them plus (Dr. Doom) get teleported into the N-zone and they get transformed into alternate universe versions of themselves, with the rocky heads and the invisible blondeness and stuff. And they become really passive-aggressive. Like the Thing is always saying, "Is it clobberin' time? Do you think it is? I don't know."

The Fly. In both the 1950s movies and the 1986 version, it's a teleportation accident that turns an inquiring scientist (Jeff Goldblum in the 1986 version) into a half-human, half-fly mutant. In the 1958 original, the scientist starts off his somewhat safeguard-free experiments by teleporting his cat, Dandolo, into a monstrous dimension where we can hear the cat screaming for help. And the cat never gets rescued! That's fucken hardcore. In the new version, Jeff Goldblum wants to stick Geena Davis into the teleportation machine so he can merge with both her and his fly parts, thus creating an even more awesome mutant. Not surprisingly, David Cronenberg is turning his version into an opera.

Blake's 7. I lost count of how many times people get teleported into space on this show, but it happens a lot. It's the show's get-out-of-jeopardy-free card. It definitely happens to Brian Blessed in the third episode. But given Brian's planet-sized ego, he shouldn't actually have been harmed by being zapped into space. He could just generate his own atmosphere and gravity field, with the force of his shouting.

Thunderbolts: Baron Zemo's mind gets zapped into Techno's mechanical "Tech-Pack" in a teleportation accident, according to the source of all lies wisdom.

Dinobots. In one of the origins of these awesome Dinosaurs-in-Disguise robots, they suffered an accident with the teleportation systems of the supercomputer Teletran-3, which zaps them back into Earth's prehistory where they turn into the robot dinos we love.

There's also a BBC show for kids called A Purrfect Villain, which sounds totally meowniacal:

Victor's DNA gets mixed up with that of a cat in a teleportation accident. Victor gets the cat's nine lives while the cat gets the computer code to destroy the world and turn all human life to jelly! The chase is on to save the planet, as Victor loses life after life while the cat types in the code numbers one by one over the internet.

I love that synopsis so much!

And then there's this:

According to Reuters, Cronerberg has said that the opera version of The Fly isn't a straight remake of the movie — so opera-goers can expect some surprises. Reuters continues:

Movies have rarely made the transition to the world of opera, but Cronenberg said the basic plot of "The Fly" had the elements of love story, retribution and transformation common to many operas that made it ideal for a stage treatment.

If this opera version of The Fly goes well, I'm hoping for an adaptation of 2001 for the opera hall. Call it a space opera opera.

The Fly opens this month at the Los Angeles Opera.

The Fly Gets Opera Treatment [Reuters]

The new show - developed by Cronenberg and The Lord of The Rings soundtrack composer Howard Shore makes its debut in France next week, before coming to the US for a LA run this September. The official synopsis of the show runs as follows:

The Fly is an engrossing exploration of the physical and psychological transformation in which a brilliant scientist begins to mutate into a hybrid of man and fly after one of his experiments goes horribly wrong. Researcher Seth Brundle makes a stunning breakthrough in the field of matter transportation when he successfully teleports a living creature. Frustrated in his budding romance with a scientific journalist, and in need of a human subject, he recklessly attempts to teleport himself. An unseen fly enters the transmission booth as well, however, and Brundle soon realizes that his experiment has had "mixed" results.

"Mixed" in this case meaning "Expect brutal arm-wrestling incidents that turn into graceful dance routines, all put to a toe-tapping beat," of course. How long before this show follows The Producers and Hairspray in the movie-musical-moviemusical route, and can we tempt Jeff Goldblum back when it does?

Seth Brundle Sings His Greatest Hits [Chud]

For my money, two of the scariest science horror flicks out there are David Cronenberg's 1980s version of The Fly, and Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. What stands out about them, aside from the fact that they are eat-your-arm scary, is that they are both sustained, visually-arresting movies about men going apeshit because they are men.

The Fly is a simple tale of a guy who has invented a teleportation pod that has a bug in it — literally. One day when our mad scientist Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is zooming between pods a fly gets stuck in there with him and the computer decides the best way to deal with the situation is to merge the two creatures genetically and create BrundleFly.

The film's special effects sometimes look strange and jerky to our CGI-trained senses, but Cronenberg manages to use a puppet-and-prosthetics infrastructure to his advantage by sticking to visuals that look as real as possible. When our mad scientist Jeff Brundle merges genetically with a fly and starts to transform, we are truly grossed out by his mulchy face and sudden need to eat sugary food by barfing on it first and then slurping it up fly-style.

Brundle is a stereotypical male science geek, totally obsessed with his machines and teleportation experiments to the point of caring about little else (though he does take some time out to get with Geena Davis — who wouldn't?) He's your basic guy nerd who doesn't give a crap about his body or meatspace. It's all about the machines. Brundle's rapid physical deterioration into half-fly, half-man is as pathetic as it is terrifying: He makes us gag and we feel sorry for him, so when he goes lethal, we sort of understand why. His gooey revenge is exactly what the Star Wars Kid has in mind for us.

28 Days Later draws its frenetic horror from another stereotypical idea about what dudes are like when given the chance. A virus turns most of the population of England into bloodthirsty, mindless superzombies, and one of the only holdouts against the diseased hordes is a military squadron holed up in a fortified mansion in the country. Our heroes, who have also managed to survive and escape London, join the military dudes for safety.

But then they discover the truly scary shit. These military guys, led by Christopher Eccleston at his most eye-buggingly Naziesque, have been trying to lure women into their little lair so that they can imprison them, rape them, and "restart the human race." Unfortunately, two of our heroes are female and now they're trapped between zombieland and a dark, dudely place.

This is a gory movie, but its horror doesn't come from looking at decaying bodies like it does in The Fly. Instead, it's scary because we're watching a decaying society. In Boyle's vision of the apocalypse, a bunch of guys with guns are more horrifying than any genetic disaster. He seems to suggest that men automatically revert to a state of violence and rape when provoked, and the inevitability of that transformation is what terrifies — the fact that these men seem so blind to the fact that they've become monsters.

And yet one of the heroes of 28 Days, Jim, is a guy who refuses to join Eccleston and his rape gang. He has no interest in possessing his female companions, and his blood-soaked rescue of the women takes up the latter half of the film. I think seeing the evil military guys through the eyes of another man who doesn't want to be like them makes this movie even more of a nail-biter. It would be easy for Jim to join up, to stay safe in the house protected by their guns, and to have a little gang rape for fun on the side. But he fights tooth and nail (literally) to stop that from happening.

In fighting the monstrous men, of course, Jim has to become a little bit like them. Those fight scenes are some of the most chair-grippingly intense I have ever seen. Scary, gory, shocking.

That's true horror, people. And never a vadge in sight.