Rating: 
Summary: The Supernatural made to order.
Review: This is a very well done movie for the time that it was filmed. We didn't have the superlative special effects of ILM to enhance this movie so we have to depend on the acting ability of the cast. Kirk Douglas, a young Amy Irving, Charles Durning, Carrie Snodgress, John Casssavetes and of course Andrew Stevens. The cast alone should entice you to see this one. Without going into too much of the plot, yes a horror/thriller movie can have a plot. Kirk Douglas has been searching for his son played by Andrew Stevens, in order to get him back from a nasty bunch of folks at a government run facility for especially gifted children with extraordinary mental abilities. Lots of action, suspense filled, a joy to watch Andrew and Amy when they both must have been just out of their teens. Portions of this movie, especially at the end are not for children or preteens, if you don't want them up all night. But for the true horror/suspense fanatic this movie is right up your alley. Buy it and you will not be sorry you did!!!
Rating:
Summary: The Supernatural made to order.
Review: This is a very well done movie for the time that it was filmed. We didn't have the superlative special effects of ILM to enhance this movie so we have to depend on the acting ability of the cast. Kirk Douglas, a young Amy Irving, Charles Durning, Carrie Snodgress, John Casssavetes and of course Andrew Stevens. The cast alone should entice you to see this one. Without going into too much of the plot, yes a horror/thriller movie can have a plot. Kirk Douglas has been searching for his son played by Andrew Stevens, in order to get him back from a nasty bunch of folks at a government run facility for especially gifted children with extraordinary mental abilities. Lots of action, suspense filled, a joy to watch Andrew and Amy when they both must have been just out of their teens. Portions of this movie, especially at the end are not for children or preteens, if you don't want them up all night. But for the true horror/suspense fanatic this movie is right up your alley. Buy it and you will not be sorry you did!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Make sure your fast forward is working before viewing
Review: This review concentrates both on the quality of the DVD and that of the film itself. For the most part, the picture is clear and evenly lit. However, there are about 14 scenes where the picture quality is devastatingly poor. A constant "popcorn" effect during these scenes makes the average VHS quality look superlative. It is somewhat jarring since in some scenes as camera angles change, the quality of the image changes drastically, whilst still within the same scene. Night scenes and close-ups are especially horrid. Now the film....Don't get too hung up on plot. In fact, I would suggest watching the first ten minutes then fast forwarding about 25 minutes, then stopping once again and fast forwarding for another 15 minutes. You get the picture. There are so many scenes that serve no purpose. Not only do they not advance the plot, but they actually weigh down the picture. They also are not particuarly stylish and are sometimes actually painful to focus on. DePalma tries his hand at comedy in a few of these scenes with nauseating results. Not only are the actors ill-suited for comedy bits, but they clash with the seriousness of the main characters struggle. And forget about character development...you'd be better off creating a little background for each character on your own. Andrew Stevens' character supposedly went through some kind of metamorphosis in this film, and thank god some other characters chat about it casually because who the heck knows how he got from point A to point B. In addition, Pino Donaggio and Bernard Herrmann are sorely missed. John William's score, though dramatic, is only dramatically boring. The two stars are for the well-orchestrated paragon institute escape scene and amy irving's telekinesis scenes, and depalma's selection of carrie snodgress for a small role. This one is only for DEPALMA heads. You'll have a good time picking up on DePalma ripping off his own films and spotting DePalma regulars such as Denis Franz, William Finley, & Charles Durning as well no-names at that time, Laura Innes, Darryl Hannah, Melody Thomas Scott and James Belushi. If you're looking for DePalma's best, try Blow Out!, Carrie, Dressed to Kill, or Obsession.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful, bloody, and intense
Review: This sci-fi horror espionage thriller has a weak script and clumsy plot but some beautiful horror set pieces. As with Brian De Palma's previous film, CARRIE, the focus here is a sweet young girl (Amy Irving) with awesome telekinetic powers. She's searching for her "psychic twin" captured by a secret government agency for use as a military weapon; Kirk Douglas plays the boy's superspy father who's also looking for him. As with CARRIE, you fall in love with the girl just as the most awful things start happening to her--and, this being De Palma, those awful things involve lots and lots of blood. The movie builds its tension slowly, leisurely, and then, wham, you're hit with some of the most intense horror sequences ever put on film. De Palma's a very smart director who's not all that interested in script or plot--he's just interested in orchestrating the terror sequences for maximum effect. If you give in to the film's sometimes quirky rhythms and oddball attempts at humor, it's quite a ride.
Rating:
Summary: Some Fun Set Pieces. Otherwise a Mess.
Review: WE start out in the Middle East where Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas) and his son Robin (Andrew Stevens) are about to leave for the USA. Peter meanwhile says his goodbyes to Ben Childress (John Cassavetes) who has been working with him hitherto in some nameless and shadowy US government agency. Then suddenly there is tons of shooting and Robin is being led away by Childress believing, mistakenly, that his father has been killed. Whereupon we switch scenes to the US where a young wman Gillian (Amy Irving) is getting very distressed by the way people she touches tend to start bleeding spontaneously. Desperate for help, she finds her way into the hands of the benign-seeming Paragon Foundation where what appear to be nice medical types work with young people who appear to have unusual paranormal powers. Meanwhile Kirk Douglas is running round the place like a mad thing, hiring psychics and hijacking police cars to try to find his son who, it seems, was also endowed with weird telekinetic powers and who has been taken off by the by now evidently very bad Childress who wants to develop him as a weapon ("The Chinese haven't got one. The Soviets haven't got one.") And Childress and his sinister associates, it turns out, are breathing rather hard down the necks of the management of the Paragon Foundation and are starting to get very interested in Gillian.
It's all really a bit of a mess. Someone really needed to tell De Palma that telekinesis is just about interesting enough a theme that a director might reasonably expect to squeeze one interesting movie out of in the course of his career as he just had with `Carrie'. But two is really pushing it. Being a De Palma movie it has various Hitchcock-style set pieces such as the early car chase with the hijacked cops and the fairground scene. These, it must be conceded, are quite fun. Otherwise it's a highly unsatisfying film. Of the three main characters, Robin is absent most of the film and when he turned up again at last has been warped by his programme of treatment into a sort of absurd exaggeration of a spoilt and petulant teenager; Kirk Douglas is a peculiarly silly and implausible case of the near geriatric action-hero phenomenon; and Irving's Gillian spends most of the film screaming and sobbing firmly in the irritating tradition of the very drippiest type of screen heroines. That's about it, apart from Cassavetes silly pantomime villain. Other defects abound. In `Carrie', wisely, no attempt was made to explain Sissy Spacek's unusual powers. Here we get intrusive and painful garbage about `the bioplasmic universe'. Notoriously de Palma is a director who is capable both of interesting and effective movies and of proper turkeys. This is one of the turkeys.
Rating:
Summary: Very Little Suspense, Very Many Unintentional Laughs
Review: When I was a young child in 1978-79 watching this on HBO I thought this movie was cool because people blew up in it and a fairground ride went spinning out of control. 25 years later, I watch it again and hardly anything is cool about it. The dialogue is laughable, Kirk Douglas is ridiculous as a geriatric James Bond who leaps out 4 story bedroom windows in his underpants, comandeers a shiny new Cadillac just to drive it off the end of a pier, and seranades his girlfriend with an obscene phone call. John Cassavetes looks like he's trying to parody some Dr. Strangelove-type villian by walking around in a sling with a black glove on his useless hand, glaring at everyone and spouting the worst sort of "bad guy" cliches. What else? Well, when Carrie Snodgrass goes flying through the windshield of a car, the windshield shatters like some plate glass saloon window from a low-budget Western. And there's plenty of blood in this movie, but not a drop of it looks real. Andrew Stevens goes from lovable son to patricidal maniac without so much as a shred of explanation. Amy Irving escapes from a supposedly fortress-like prison by simply shoving a bunch of packages at someone and running out the backdoor. Oh, yeah, you know when Andrew Stevens is really, REALLY mad when the veins on his forehead pop out. Sometimes his eyes even glow blue. There's more, but what's the use recounting it? I'll give it two stars because it's not the worst movie ever. But at times it really comes close. Isn't DePalma supposed to be a genius or something?
Rating:
Summary: The perfect movie for a drunken binge
Review: You already know the plot, so I'll get right to the meat of it. "The Fury" is one of the coolest De Palma movies there is. I first saw this movie on TNT when Joe Bob Briggs did a show called Friday night Monstervision. He did drive-in totals, and I'm sure those totals would help you now.
This movie has: 23 dead bodies. 1, full-torso body explosion. 1 car wreck with crash and burn. 1 boat wreck with crash and burn. 1 car wreck with bloody civilian casualty. 1 former Playmate turned inside out.
Hey, the movie sold me with those and it got better from there. How can you resist a movie where a bad guy has no use in one of his arms. Especially when a character asks what happened to that guy's arm and Kirk Douglas cooly replies, "I killed it. With a machine gun." Now that's entertainment.
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