'THE FURY'........IF IT BLEEDS, IT LEADS.......

The Fury (1978)       Director Brian DePalma doesn't much care for this film.......we can only assume his disdain must come from the tribulations of its production......(it certainly looks like it could been a bitch to film)......cause the BQ is more than happy with the end result......quintessential DePalma: calculated, cruel humor, self-absorbed, ostentatious visuals designed to simultaneously punch up the story and celebrate DePalma's own cleverness, a la Hitchcock.

             Taken from a John Farris novel, DePalma uses the material to further dial up the premise of his adaptation of Stephen King's "Carrie" to stratospheric heights,  The screenplay, also by Farris, gives us not one but two teenagers gifted with telekinetic superpower.  Gillian (Amy Irving), sweetly innocent, regularly succumbs to eye-bulging hysteria whenever her mind-over-matter skills inadvertently touch off heavy bleeding in those who upset her. Naturally, this bodes not well for the cafeteria mean girls who lunch with her.....(DePalma saves Gillian's premier trick for the film's legendary final ten seconds......in which she makes Sissy Spacek's Carrie look like Strawberry Shortcake....)

             Her psychic soulmate and fellow telekinetic terminator Robin (Andrew Stevens) has already been kidnapped by a shadowy government agency, drugged and experimented on to the point of turning him into a permanently enraged, violent psychotic. This doesn't sit well with Robin's father Peter (an aging but physically game Kirk Douglas), a renegade operative for the creepy agency......determined to reclaim his son and exact furious vengeance on his satanically evil former boss Childress (John Cassavetes, no doubt picking up more extra cash for his independent films....)

            That's more than enough plot to send Brian DePalma off the races with a series of vividly staged and photographed set pieces.......Douglas's  James Bondish fights and flights from Cassavetes' goons, Stevens' spectacular telekinetic destruction of an amusement park ride, and liberally blood splattered scenes of the two teens wreaking psychic havoc on any foolish humans attempting to use and abuse them.

            Put all this stuff together and you've got yourself one pumped-up package of horror, high melodrama, action movie chases and shootouts and Hollywood's favorite post-Nixon villains, rogue Feds with bad intentions.......all of it richly, ominously scored by John Williams, filling in for the composer DePalma would have most certainly hired, had he lived a few years longer....Bernard Herrmann.

              Williams cleverly channels Herrmann into his main title theme, which serves as a synopsis for the entire movie, with the orchestra swelling into an operatic crescendo. It's a superb harbinger of DePalma's visual crescendo for the movie's final sequence.......a few seconds so beyond rational description, we wouldn't make any attempt at it........other than to mention how DePalma used multiple cameras and rapid cutting to make the finale of "The Fury" take its place as one of the great, Grand Opera fever dream climaxes in modern cinema.

               And yet amid the sweeping Williams music and fountains of spilled blood, DePalma periodically inserts his patented oddball comedy moments, a few scenes that could have easily been lifted out of his early, raggedy independent comedies, "Greetings" and "Hi Mom".....Douglas's encounters with a feisty grandma and two cops he's hijacked.

               So even if it isn't one of Brian DePalma's favorites, the BQ still furiously digs "The Fury" and we'll telekinetically hover 4 stars over the movie (****)......(you'll just have to take our word for it that they're hovering.....)