The Fury (1978)

This was great in '78, & still holds up today

I remember this film well & have nothing but good things to say about it. Kirk Douglas, & Amy Irving were very good in thier portrayals, as was sexy Andrew Stevens. I love when his eyes turn that bright blue color, & watching him get angry in the film makes him even sexier. I'd like to add that John Cassavettes was perfectly cast as the bad guy here & the plot was fun to watch.

My only regret about the DVD release is the fact that the original poster ad wasn't used on the jacket. The one of the man & woman that reads... "an experience in terror & suspense". Obviously the two were supposed to have been Amy & Andrew, though the woman in the ad bore little resemblance (if any) to Amy & the man looked nothing at all like Andrew Stevens.

Another thing is I loved the scene towards the end when Andrew Stevens is spinning around that woman, it was very intense & alot of fun to watch. I will always consider this among the greatest horror films ever made & a Brian DePalma masterpiece. Check this one out. April 30, 2008

An Unofficial Sequel To "Carrie"

"The Fury" is another masterpiece of modern horror directed by Brian DePalma who also directed such blockbusters as "Body Double," "Dressed To Kill," and one of my personal favorites, "Carrie." Both "Carrie" and "The Fury" deal with teenagers with telekinetic powers. No one suspected Carrie White had telekinesis until it was too late. On prom night, she killed most all of her classmates and teachers and is eventually murdered by her mom. In "The Fury," our government discovers that two teenagers, Robin and Gillian, have telekinesis and want to use them as weapons. This same plot was visited again a few years later by Stephen King in "Fire Starter."

Movie legend, Kirk Douglas, is Peter Sanza, who is desperately searching for his son, Robin, who was stolen from him. His shootouts and car chases with the Federal agents is the action/thriller part of the movie. The horror part is what Robin and Gillian can do to their victims: literally tear them apart with their thoughts.

"The Fury" depicts what might have happened to Carrie White if she had survived her prom night. A government agency would have captured and imprisoned her. Then they would've ran a series of tests in order to control and exploit her powers.

"The Fury" has wonderful direction from Brian DePalma; scenes that alternate from the Mid East to Chicago, and an all star cast that includes Amy Irving ("Carrie"), John Casavetes ("Rosemary's Baby"), Charles Durning ("When A Stranger Calls"), Andrew Stevens ("The Seduction"), and Carrie Snodgrass ("Murphy's Law"). It is highly recommended for those who collect paranormal science fiction horror or, if you are like me, enjoy horror classics from the seventies.
April 11, 2008

Amazingly Dull, Simplistic Supernatural "Thriller"

There are spoilers throughout this review. The movie's 30 years old; I think the moratorium on spoilers has expired.

Brian DePalma has a reputation as a "style over substance" kind of director as well as an imitator of Alfred Hitchcock. This reputation is not wholly deserved; he sometimes transcends this image ("Carrie", "The Untouchables"). However, when he reverts back to full-blown Hitchcock on Acid mode, look out! That's exactly what DePalma does in "The Fury."

The story, called "convoluted" by many, is nothing of the kind! Here's the story, in its entirety: An ex-government agent (Douglas) has a teenage son (Stevens) who possesses extraordinary psychic powers. The government agency kidnaps the son and attempts (but fails) to kill the father. This all happens in the first 10 minutes, and the father spends the rest of the movie (two tedious hours) trying to find his son with the aid of a teenage girl (Irving) with psychic powers and a telepathic link to his son. In the last 10 minutes, they find his son, then both father and son die, then the girl kills the Bad Guy (Cassavetes) responsible for the kidnapping. The end.

Probably the reason so many viewers think this ridiculously simplistic story is "convoluted" is because of all the superfluous scenes we are treated to in the intervening two hours. Like:

Kirk Douglas breaking into the apartment of a bickering middle-aged couple and the little old lady who lives with them, the cutely-named "Mother Knuckles," painting his hair with white shoe polish, putting a pillow in his pants, flirting with Mother Knuckles, tying up the couple on their couch in front of the television (ham-fisted social commentary, anyone?), and then leaving, only to be immediately spotted by the Bad Guys in spite of his disguise. So why the heck was so much time spent on this ridiculous narrative detour?

Amy Irving at her new School For Teenage Psychics, twirling around her white wicker-and-flowered wallpaper bedroom, taking long walks in the park with Charles Durning, playing Frisbee with a dog (in slow motion, naturally), and making big gooey sundaes with the Mad Housewife herself, Carrie Snodgress (pay careful attention to this scene to take delight in Irving's nauseating habit of constantly digging into a bowl of toppings with her fingers, sprinkling the stuff on her sundae, licking her fingers, then digging the newly-moist fingers back into another bowl of toppings; she does this half a dozen times and makes it virtually impossible to pay any attention to the conversation, which doesn't contain any imperative dialogue, anyway). Again, what is the purpose of this long sequence, other than letting us know that for a brief while, Irving's character gets to be happy? Admittedly, you need SOME "down time" in a thriller, but two freakin' hours of it? Come on.

The superfluous scenes would be bad enough, but what makes them even worse is the fact that absolutely ESSENTIAL scenes are missing. For instance, after Stevens's character is kidnapped and taken to the compound, he apparently undergoes brainwashing techniques that turn him into a homicidal psychopath. But we aren't SHOWN his conversion; instead, to make up for this MAJOR deficiency, some obviously dubbed-in-at-a-later-date expository dialogue is played over scenes of him pole-vaulting. (???) Amazingly, even though they are specifically trying to fill story gaps, they don't say anything that actually accomplishes that purpose! We're given some gobbledygook about how he gets really upset whenever his physical prowess doesn't match his psychic powers. This is supposed to explain why he later makes a carnival ride go berserk, flinging riders 50 feet in the air, and why he turns his girlfriend into a whirling dervish!

Even when the scenes actually could serve a narrative purpose, DePalma drags them on WAY too long, then doesn't give us any pay-off. An example: We already know Irving's character is psychic when some folks from the Psychic School come to her high school to demonstrate that people's Alpha waves can actually run an electric train. Yes, I know you're all remembering the many, many times you witnessed such demonstrations at your high school. Right. Anyway, at this point anyone with an IQ over 80 who has actually ever seen a movie - any movie - knows where this scene is going. Amy Irving will get the electrodes strapped to her forehead and make the damn thing jump the tracks with the force of her Alpha-ness. What you might not be able to predict is just how excruciatingly l-o-n-g DePalma drags out the wholly inevitable denouement. It feels like HOURS as the train goes faster and faster, with a dubbed-in whining sound getting higher and higher (in case we didn't get it) and reaction shots of every single person in the room with the patented "WTF?!?" look on their faces before finally the train de-rails. Now, this scene, protracted as it was, might have actually served SOME purpose if an action had flowed directly from it, ie: the doctor from the school signing up Irving then and there. Incredibly, nothing of the sort happens! We have to wait a few scenes for Irving to tell her mother that she wants to go to a "special school" and it is only after she arrives that we know this is in fact the same school that did the train demonstration. HELLO, this is BAD storytelling, folks.

And then there's John Cassavetes. Holy cow. For those who aren't familiar with Cassavetes, he was essentially the first independent filmmaker, making his own movies on ultra-low budgets that didn't toe the studio line. The films were critically lauded but not seen by many people. Supposedly he only acted in studio pictures in order to make money to finance his own ventures, and while that may be nominally true, he DID at least seem to invest something in many of his roles, ie: his early television one-shots and "The Dirty Dozen." In "The Fury," however, the man sleep-walks through his role; at one point during a "suspenseful" chase scene in which he's in the backseat of a car, his head is clearly just lolling backwards as if it's Nap Time. You can hardly blame the guy - it's a Snidely Whiplash role with absolutely no nuance or shading, and fer crying out loud, he's blown up at the end - but the fact is that Cassavetes's zombified performance adds even more badness to the movie.

Wow, there is so much more to dislike about this movie. In the interest of wrapping things up, I'll go to bullet points:

*Every time a character outlives his or her usefulness (to the scenarist, to propel the plot along), he or she dies violently. Every. Time. Once again, bad writing.

*Right before psychics die, their eyes glow an unearthly blue and they transfer all their powers to the psychic who is cradling their head in their lap. Thank you, Brian DePalma, for this newfound knowledge.

*Cars do not, in fact, use safety glass (that spiderwebs), but rather plate glass (that shatters). This is because the latter looks so much cooler when photographed.

*You'd think it would be heaven to be married to Mr. Carlson, but no.

*When it's important to the plot that anybody who touches Amy Irving starts to bleed, they bleed. When it's important to the plot that people be allowed to touch her, they don't.

*All of the "comic relief" scenes are uniformly dire.

*Could we at least be given some hint of why the government thinks that having a teenage psychic is so important? "The Chinese don't have one, the Soviets don't have one..." maybe because they see limited military applications for making electric trains run off Alpha waves and accurately assessing that the guy behind them is looking at "three wavy lines."

Two stars instead of one, because on a technical level, the movie is competent (ie: there's some good photography, and Williams's score, while imitating Bernard Herrmann too slavishly, is not bad, if also not great). The bottom line: Not good enough to be fun, but not bad enough to be fun either. Don't waste your time. March 29, 2008

Style over Substance in this oddly compelling mixture of CARRIE and FIRESTARTER from DePalma

Listen up, now, for although this seems like an utterly incoherent, parapsychological thriller, in fact every plot point is carefully explained. KIRK DOUGLAS and JOHN CASSSAVETES both work for a government agency so secret that no one's ever heard of it, see, which is why Cassavetes has to kidnap Douglas's psychic son, ANDREW STEVENS, leaving Douglas for dead (only he's not) and -- well, as Douglas says, "Somebody's gotta stop 'em." Got that? Stevens sends brain waves (but not acting lessons) to his psychic twin, AMY IRVING, who watching CARRIE SNODGRASS demonstrate that when she's "in alpha" she can make model trains run, thereby making it clear that the potential for harnessing psychic powers is as limitless, say, as a filmmaker's imagination. Got that?

Why does classmate HILARY THOMPSON bleed when Irving touches her? Well, Irving's "power to psychometrize is spontaneous. Almost everyone exposed to it will bleed. Some will bleed a little, some will bleed a lot." Got that? (Too bad, then, that Irving didn't touch classmate DARYL HANNAH, making her film debut, in order to save us all from prolonged exposure to Hannah's thespian efforts.) The "gifted" Irving transfers to the Paragon Insitute, where CHARLES DURNING blathers about "the bioplasmic universe. Occasionally, you make a connection between the timeless world and the physical world -- you have what clairvoyants call a vision." Got that? (This might explain why other, more "gifted" actors had the "vision" to steer clear of this movie.)

Snodgrass, who works at Paragon, is Douglas's girlfriend. When she tells him that the records indicate that Stevens is dead, Douglas explains that that means he's alive. Got that? He asks her to assist Irving's escape so she can lead him to Stevens. Irving is, in fact, having visions of Stevens being terrorized in unspeakable, inhuman ways -- she sees that he's being made to watch, against his will, earlier scenes from the film -- at the country estate of FIONA LEWIS, who works for Cassavetes. Ah, it begins to make sense now, right? No?

"How's our boy wonder?" Cassavetes inquires, sporting a black glove, black arm sling and matching black eyepatch. Some expert replies, "He's developing the power of an atomic reactor," but Lewis is much closer to the mark when she adds, "Or an atomic bomb." It all ends when Douglas and Irving race to the hideaway, but by then Stevens has levitated and whirled Lewis to death! Stevens dies, too, but not before transferring his evil soul into Irving. Cassavetes remarks to Irving -- really Stevens, see? -- "I hope you don't judge me too harshly. I don't say what I did was right or wrong. I only know that I acted" -- overacted is the word we'd use -- and she/he/they give the movie a big finish by, literally exploding Cassavetes. If only someone had done the same to Brian DePalma before the move was made from this screeplay by John Ferris (based on his novel). January 6, 2008

very good movie

i really love this movie it's very unique from all those other 70's horror movies i've seen very good ending well i guess you can call it more of a suspense then horror but what ever it is it's a real good movie ! October 21, 2007

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