Hilariously, during an early scene in Brian De Palma’s 1978 supernatural thriller The Fury, a character actually says out loud, “No particular talent is needed to achieve.this.” Wow, could a better summation of the movie exist? That’s it right there. Review over. The end.
No, I’ll go on a little if I must. The Fury was De Palma’s immediate follow-up to his adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie. That earlier film was well-reviewed, a box office hit, and went on to be regarded as a classic. Naturally, Hollywood and audiences expected an encore. As is too often the case, they wanted more of the same. In this instance, the director was willing to indulge them. If not a direct sequel (I don’t believe he’s ever done one), De Palma’s new movie would be very similar, just a little bigger. If Carrie was about a teenager with telekinetic powers, The Fury would have two teenagers with telekinetic powers! What a twist!
This was not a great idea. The Fury is often forgotten amid Brian De Palma’s artistic and career successes from the late 1970s to about the mid-1990s. As it turns out, that’s with very good reason.
| Title: | The Fury |
| Year of Release: | 1978 |
| Director: | Brian De Palma (credited as Brian DePalma) |
| Watched On: | Blu-ray |
| Also Available On: | Amazon Prime Video Various VOD purchase and rental platforms |
In addition to the obvious Carrie inspiration, The Fury was also designed as something of a comeback vehicle for legendary star Kirk Douglas. While he’d worked steadily in the meantime, including in some good movies, the actor hadn’t been in a significant box office hit since probably Spartacus in 1960. He needed one, and this must have looked like an easy lay-up.
To prove that he not only remained relevant, but was still virile and masculine even at age 61, Douglas spends an inordinate amount of time in the movie shirtless and wearing nothing but swim trunks or boxer shorts. I swear, I think he may have even invented parkour in a scene that sees him leaping over elevated train tracks and across buildings in his underwear. This is a real thing that actually happens on screen, and it’s bananas.
Douglas plays Peter Stanza, a former government agent of some sort living happily in retirement with his son Robin, until a group of dirty Muslim terrorists (yeah, more than a couple parts of the movie are very uncomfortable in their racism) storm the beach where he’s vacationing, machine-gun a bunch of innocent sunbathers, and kidnap the boy. Despite Peter’s best efforts to Rambo his way to through them and rescue his son, the survivors of his wrath get away with the kid, as if he were the target all along.
If this may seem excessive, we quickly find out that the whole scheme was orchestrated by Peter’s longtime Agency buddy Childress (John Cassavetes, doing his best to out-evil his own work in Rosemary’s Baby). You see, Robin has latent psychic powers that a secretive government cabal wants to harness as a weapon, as is the wont of such organizations to do. Peter quickly tracks this plot to Chicago, and specifically to the Parallax Institute, an X-Men style School for the Gifted that identifies and trains young people with burgeoning super powers. The star student there is a girl named Gillian, pronounced with a hard “G” and played by Amy Irving. Gillian can reach the Alpha state and make a toy train zoom around its tracks far faster than any of her classmates.
Long story short, Peter needs Gillian’s help to break his son out of his boarding school prison. While Gillian is sweet and naïve and innocent, Robin has turned into an evil, murderous psycho. Maybe the Institute turned him that way, but just as likely he was always a creep and dad Peter just never saw it. Obviously, this must all culminate with a standoff between the two telepaths, resulting in some state-of-the-art 1970s splatter gore.
Let me be very clear; this movie is terrible. It’s extremely dumb and, worse, extremely tedious on top of that. The characters are mostly unlikable, the performances hammy, and aging star Kirk Douglas’ macho heroics pretty ridiculous.
Adapted by author John Farris from his own novel, the writer must have been a big-time believer in ESP, astral projection, and other inane hooey of the era. He no doubt took this nonsense very seriously and believed he had developed a cohesive and compelling mythology, all of which should look and sound idiotic to anyone outside his echo chamber.
Meanwhile, you can tell that director De Palma treated this as a paycheck gig and had next to no interest in what he was making. Aside from some titled Dutch angle shots and a couple half-hearted action set-pieces, it barely feels like his work at all. Even the movie’s best scene, the climactic psychic showdown, is a pale retread of Carrie. About the only redeeming qualities The Fury may have are a nice musical score by John Williams that outclasses the material, and some fun makeup effects by Rick Baker.
I’m not sure if I can definitively call The Fury Brian De Palma’s worst film. Having seen both The Bonfire of the Vanities and Mission to Mars, that’s a tough call. At the very least, it’s one of his most impersonal and I’ll be happy to go the rest of my life without ever watching it again.
Thankfully, the director would bounce back from this fiasco just two years later with Dressed to Kill, one of his best movies that still earns both its controversy and its acclaim.
The Blu-ray
The Fury has had a messy history on high-def home video. To date, the only Blu-ray release in the American market arrived back in 2013 on a disc from Twilight Time with terrible A/V quality and almost no bonus features. Obviously an old video master probably struck for DVD, the 1.85:1 image is plagued by artificial sharpening that exaggerates grain to a sandpaper-like texture over the entire picture. While edge enhancement halos are surprisingly mild in most scenes, they show up strongly in others, and the whole movie has a very gritty, unnatural appearance. The film element used also has recurring speckling and small scratches.
I don’t blame Twilight Time here. The video master was undoubtedly provided by Twentieth Century Fox as copyright holder. Still, the label got shafted.
The audio isn’t much better. Offered in a choice of DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (which sounds like mono) or 4.0, both tracks are weak with no low end and brittle, scratchy dialogue that distorts in louder scenes. I don’t know if that’s endemic to the original sound mix or a home video issue. Of the two, the 4.0 is a little bit more robust with the music, though the right surround channel is completely dead for some reason while audio does come from the left surround. (Yes, I checked this with both test tones and another disc, and the speakers are working fine.) Neither track is very good.
Extras are limited to an isolated score track, a trailer, and a booklet essay by Twilight Time’s Julie Kirgo. Considering that the John Williams score is easily the best part of the movie, I actually do appreciate an option to watch without having to listen to any of the banal dialogue.
Things are quite different overseas, where Arrow Video released its own Blu-ray for the UK market just seven months later in 2013. Given the close proximity, I’d normally assume the two discs must have come from the same source. However, Arrow’s packaging boasts of a, “Brand new digital transfer of the film from a new 2K scan of the original camera negative.” I don’t have that Arrow disc, but just by description alone I have to believe it must look better than Twilight Time’s, which definitely could not have come from the camera negative.
Less clear is the audio situation. Arrow claims, “mono 2.0 PCM audio and 4.0 DTS-HD Master Audio.” Aside from the switch from DTS Master Audio to PCM for the mono, those would appear to be the same as Twilight Time’s disc. Has Arrow remastered either of them to sound better? I can’t say.
Arrow’s disc also has a selection of exclusive bonus features. For fans of the movie, however many may exist, Arrow seems to be the way to go.
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- Brian De Palma (director)
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