Although The Fury (1978, directed by Brian De Palma) is the director's dumbest film--which is saying something--it has its compensations. Prime among them is the director's film sense, which is entirely separate from the story on screen. De Palma knows where to put the camera and when to move it. He uses slow motion and sound (or the lack thereof) to impart a sleek maximalist commercial veneer to the film. He also knows how to be cruel to the audience, like he's in some parasocial BDSM relationship with them. The Fury is also a mini-summary of his career at that moment. It's a psychic thriller a la Carrie, a paranoia thriller like Sisters (complete with sinister experiments at shadowy institutes), and it's a conspiracy film that anticipates Blow Out. It even has that wonky sense of absurdist anti-establishment humor from his earliest films. Then it blows it all up in one of the biggest what the fuck climaxes in film.
The story follows intelligence operative Peter Sandza, whose son Robin is possessed of wild talents. When the film opens, Peter and Robin are relaxing on the beach in the middle east (the film doesn't specify a country, but it's probably Israel, which is neither here nor there). Waiting on the patio above the beach is Peter's colleague, Childress, who accompanies Robin away from the beach as a terrorist raid arrives in motorboats. A group of what appears to be Arabs opens up on the crowd with machine guns, and Robin watches in horror as his dad is apparently killed in an explosion. But he hasn't been killed. He's made it back to cover on shore where he witnesses Childress paying off some of the "Arabs." This is clearly a set-up so that whichever organization Childress aligns himself with can acquire Robin and his gifts. A year passes. We meet Gillian Bellaver, a Chicago teen who exhibits ESP. Raymond Dunwoody, a private eye in Peter's employ, has spotted her and he's convinced she can lead Peter to Robin. Unfortunately, Childress and his goons have been following Dunwoody, and Peter is flushed into the open. Peter leads them on a merry chase before ultimately losing them in the fog. Gillian herself is struggling. Her powers have a tendency to injure others. She tells one of her classmates that she doesn't blame her for being a bitch because she's pregnant and reading her mind causes her a nosebleed. Her mother consents to send her to the Paragon Institute where she can develop and learn to control her powers. The Paragon Institute is a front, though. It is aligned with Childress, who recruits promising psychics from their students. It's here where Gillian first senses Robin Sandza, who she sees in a vision when she grasps the arm of Dr. McKeever, the head of the institute. She sees Robin pushed out a window while being chased by the staff. It's McKeever who does the pushing. Peter has a spy in the institute, Nurse Hester, who tells him that Childress is planning to move Gillian. He convinces her to preempt this by springing Gillain herself, so Peter can use her to find Robin. This goes awry, but Gillain escapes. Together, they travel to Childress's secret compound, but when they get there, they find that Robin is very much changed from the boy Peter raised...
If you were looking for a film where Brian De Palma's style is on full display, you could do worse than The Fury. This is a film where he pulls out all of his stylistic tricks: split diopters, flash editing of single images, long slow motion action sequence where the score replaces diegetic sound, placing his characters inside memories or psychic visions. The long chase early in the film when Peter commandeers a car from a pair of off duty police cars demonstrates a keen sense of cinematic geography as De Palma moves his pieces around the board. De Palma is a grandmaster at this sort of thing. Moreover, this sequence turns delightfully abstract when it moves into a foggy construction site, where the cars themselves are denoted by the glow of headlights. This scene also features an early role for De Palma regular Dennis Franz as one of the cops. The filmmaking is grand. The cast is game, too. Charles Durning returns from Sisters to take up the role of reluctant villain McKeever, Amy Irving gets promoted from collateral damage to telekinetic heroine from Carrie, and Carrie Snodgrass plays yet another thankless role as Nurse Hester. Andrew Stevens is perhaps less good as Robin Sandza, who goes from average kid to demonic psychic murderer without much development. The scene where Robin murders some Arab tourists on an amusement ride has a casual racism to it even if the text of the movie suggests that he's traumatized by the terrorists at the beginning of the film. There's a sad commentary on the contagious nature of violence here waiting to be unlocked, but the movie isn't interested in it, not even at the very end when it recurs. The 800 lb. gorillas in the cast are Kirk Douglas and John Cassavetes. Douglas was clinging to his macho self image as a leading man well past that persona's expiration date and he attacks the part with perhaps too much gusto. This is almost as much a self-parody as what you find the next year in the even more embarrassing Saturn 3. Cassavetes understands the assignment, though. He's subtle in his villainy. He's not a barnstormer. He's often a presence in the negative space. It's a good portrait of a man corrupted by his role in the demimonde of espionage. He lets his posture do a lot of the work. I imagine that the actor took the role in to order finance Gloria, but that's fine. He doesn't phone it in. I honestly wonder what Cassavetes told De Palma about the resulting film, given that he once told Martin Scorsese (of Boxcar Bertha) that he had spent six months of his precious time on Earth making a piece of shit. He was blunt like that.
The film's technical expertise is in service to a story that's all over the place. The extended comedy play when Peter invades the apartment of Mother Knuckles and her family seems starkly out of place in a horror thriller, as do certain scenes agency underlings bickering over walkie talkie when they're bored with their duties. That's fine, though. They give the film some flavor. What's not fine is the absolute stupidity of the film's climax. When Peter and Gillian make it to the compound where Robin is being held, they find him after he has murdered his handler/lover by levitating her off the ground and spinning her to death. Robin himself lurks in the ballroom where this occurs, levitating casually in the air, well off the reservation Childress intends for him. He relents and sends Peter into the belly of the beast to try to talk him down. He tackles his father in a rage, thinking his dad has betrayed him, and they tumble out onto the roof where Robin dangles over the edge. Peter holds on to him for dear life, but Robin is still raging and he tries to kill his dad, who lets him go. He plummets to his death, followed by distraught Peter who has no more reason to live. Let's be blunt about this: this is stupid as hell. Robin has the power of levitation, of flight even. And he falls to his death? Really? The film follows this with a weird thing with Peter's eyes glowing in tandem with Gillian's eyes. Is he communicating with her? Possessing her a la Scanners? Lending her his power? I have no idea. We see those eyes again when Gillian, after refusing to be gaslit by Childress, telekinetically destroys him by blowing him into bloody bits. Whose vengeance is this? I don't know. It's all a muddle. The image of Cassavetes exploding at the end of the film is indelible, though, and the filmmakers know it. It is both an anticipation of the famous exploding head in Scanners and inferior to it. They captured the gag with multiple cameras just to make sure and damned if they don't linger on it in pornographic fascination. The money-shot nature of the gag tends to undermine it, but it's what anyone remembers if they've seen the film, so what the hell, eh?
The lion's share of the blame for all of this has to be laid at the feet of screenwriter John Farris, adapting his own novel, but the director is not blameless. De Palma surely had the power to demand rewrites or to engage script doctors. But he didn't and this is the result. It's a bad movie with the polished sheen of a good one. De Palma is often described as a classic auteur, but auteurism only goes so far. The Fury is evidence that no amount of directorial style can rescue a truly awful screenplay. This is a lesson that De Palma should have learned on this film, but in this, he's like Charles Foster Kane confronting Boss Jim Gettys. Gettys warns Kane that "You're the greatest fool I've ever known, Kane. If it was anybody else, I'd say what's going to happen to you would be a lesson to you. Only you're going to need more than one lesson. And you're going to get more than one lesson." De Palma had more such lessons waiting in his future.
Welcome to this year's October Horror Movie Challenge. I'm participating in my friend, Aaron Christensen's annual fundraiser during this year's challenge. Aaron has chosen the Women's Reproductive Rights Assistance Project again as this year's recipient for our community's largess, so if you've got a few bucks lying around, here's a donation link for the donor drive. You know what to do.
As usual with the challenge, I'll be prioritizing films that are new to me, so I'm off to a good start there. I'll also be prioritizing pre-Code, silent, and older international horror this year, because during the last few decades, the genre has gotten too big to really track. We'll see how it goes.
My current progress:
New to me films: 2
Total films:3
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