The Fury (1978)

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Many people seem to have an aversion to the films of De Palma and nothing I am going to say will change their minds. I feel he may be a little too European for some Americans, a bit too aware. There again some just mention Hitchcock and role their eyes. So, for what it is worth, let me assure anyone interested that this is a very good watch. I am not suggesting that the storyline would bear too much detailed analysis but for those with a basic understanding of the theories of mind transference, telepathy, telekinesis and the like will get much from this. I found it exciting and involving, becoming scary and then very scary as an extremely emotional tale is told. Kirk Douglas, who I am not a great fan is faultless, John Cassavetes at his Rosemary's Baby's best and if Andrew Stevens is a little flat, it works within the tale and is well covered by the fantastic performance from Amy Irvine.

The Fury is not a movie that often (if at all) turns up in the discussion of pop culture influences on the Netflix original series Stranger Things, but see if this plot summary doesn't sound familiar: A shadowy government organization abducts children with psychical abilities in the hopes of training them to become superweapons against foreign powers. Of course this was nothing new at the time, either, with rumors abounding that the CIA was conducting experiments into ESP phenomena with the aid of psychotropic drugs.The main reason to watch The Fury is to witness the directorial prowess of Brian De Palma, here revisiting the cinematic potential of telekinetic abilities after the success of Carrie. Despite the somewhat impressive cast, De Palma is the true star of the show, ushering in such visionary thriller set pieces as Gillian's escape from the duplicitous facility setting her up to become the government's next psychic guinea pig (filmed entirely in slow motion), and the demise of Dr. Susan Charles as the brainwashed and betrayed telekinetic prodigy (and lover) Robin spins her in the air so fast it rips her body apart. True, none of it quite lives up to the prom sequence in the lower-budget Carrie, but perhaps that is only because we are not nearly as invested in the characters in this follow-up film as we were in that adaptation of Stephen King's premiere novel.The performances are a mixed bag. Amy Irving, as pursued potential psychic Gillian, is good at being vulnerable, but doesn't get much to do beyond that in a role that is--at least until the final scene--incredibly passive, flitting from the charge of one character to the next like a human MacGuffin. Kirk Douglas is miscast in a role that requires a younger, warmer actor. The sexagenerian fails to convince as either the highly-trained government operative who can elude his sinister peers with both wit and physical ability, nor as the devoted father willing to scour the Earth for his missing son. Without a leading lady to woo, Douglas seems perpetually lost. (I'm not sure who would have been better--maybe someone like Roy Scheider?) John Cassavetes, the one-dimensional traitorous villain, is never as threatening or manipulatively charming as he needs to be, and Carrie Snodgress sounds dubbed through the whole film. Andrew Stevens' sneering Omen-like interpretation of wunderkind Robin belongs in a bad TV movie from the era. The two best performances are from Fiona Lewis and Charles Durning, who actually come across like human beings but are entirely irrelevant for plot purposes and could have been written out of the film entirely without too much impact.Which leads to the other primary criticism: the screenplay. I haven't read John Farris's source novel but the movie makes it abundantly clear that he was not the right choice to adapt his own material. Sometimes novelists fall in love with their own creations too much to leave anything out, and the result, as in this case, is a film adaptation that feels overstuffed and, even at two hours, rushed and underdeveloped. I know many theater patrons find the practice of splitting a single novel into two or even three films to be an abhorrent and unnecessary cash grab, but as far as The Fury is concerned I wouldn't mind another two-plus hours to flesh out its many half-baked ideas, or even a miniseries. The apparent school for psychics Gillian attends at the beginning of the movie is an intriguing environment and much more time could have been allotted to explore such notions as campus social life and class structure. (Actually, to be honest I'm not even sure if the school at the beginning is exclusively for psychics, but the classmates react so nonchalantly to Gillian telekinetically blasting a toy train off its tracks that I can't believe it's just a regular school either.) Robin's transformation from the loving son of the first scene to Sith Lord at the end is given so little screen time it's hard to develop any sympathy for the character, and the "training" utilized by the PSI to turn him into the ultimate weapon is so nonsensical (given what very little of it we do see) it makes you wonder why nobody in this highly-classified, highly-skilled government intelligence agency so much as considered the (seemingly inevitable) possibility that he would go off his rocker and kill everybody in a fit of lunatic vengeance--which, of course, he does. I also would have liked the relationship between Gillian and Peter to have more depth, and indeed, throughout the entire film character relationships and motivations are often muddy at best. There are more examples, but the overall point is that the screenplay really ought to have been streamlined and restructured before shooting ever began.In the plus column, the cinematography by Richard H. Kline is superb, perfectly dreamlike when it needs to be and merely beautiful otherwise. The special effects are well done for the time, if a little rough by today's standards, with two legendary makeup artists (Rick Baker and an uncredited Rob Bottin) contributing their talents. Gillian's visions are suitably ethereal and disorienting, playing with chronology and space in a way that keeps you tense and, at times, lost--but never frustrated. And the score, by John Williams in his heyday, isn't as eminently hummable as Star Wars or ET but is a great symphonic tribute to Bernard Hermann with nary a synthesizer in earshot (one or two theremins, though).Since adapting novels into television shows is all the rage these days, perhaps the Farris Fury series (he wrote three sequels in the early to mid 2000s) is a prime candidate. If not, this 1978 opus is, at least, never dull.

Dear Brian De Palma,you mixed up a lot of genres in The Fury. The film starts off as an action movie involving secret agencies and Arab terrorists. But then it slowly turns into a sci-fi horror movie. The plot was preposterous. But who cares? Some of the directorial flourishes were amazing. When Amy Irving's psychic character enters the past after touching her coach's hand, you played the past on a screen in the background and had Amy standing in front of it, thereby creating this virtual reality effect. It was simply ingenious, Brian. Never seen this used before for flashbacks. The editing during Amy Irving's first psychic meltdown and the slow motion sequences were excellent. The ending with multiple camera angles of John Cassavetes villain exploding into many pieces was over the top and entertaining.Kirk Douglas looked like he could fight a bear. He was 62 when he made this film. John Cassavetes was a great sinister and sleazy villain. Amy Irving perfectly conveyed the mental fragility of the psychic girl. Dennis Franz played one of those morally repugnant characters which he would repeat in Blow Up and Dressed to Kill. There was some micro-aggression against Arabs. The film could have been 20 minutes shorter. But I cannot really complain. This is what all big budget sci-fi thrillers ought to be like.Best Regards, Pimpin.(8/10)

A government agent (Kirk Douglas) is determined to come to his son's rescue, when a sinister official kidnaps him to harbor his extremely powerful psychic abilities.I find it interesting that Brian De Palma chose this as the follow-up to "Carrie". I mean, really, another film about young people with psychic powers? But it is actually quite different in spirit and acts as more of a pre-cursor of "The Dead Zone" and "Scanners".We not only get the screen debut of Daryl Hannah, but an excellent score from John Williams that was highly praised by critic Pauline Kael, who called it "as elegant and delicately varied a score as any horror film has ever had".