Blood Revenge

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE FURY

Directed by Brian De Palma Written by John Farris

Psychokinesis is the ability to focus and project mental influence on physical objects. Those who have it can, in theory anyway, move mountains or, if we are to believe The Fury, afflict people who cross them with ailments ranging from nosebleeds to cerebral hemorrhages, and worse. To most of us, psychokinesis exists in that exotic realm where pseudo-scientific speculation meets metaphysics, but for Brian De Palma it is obviously an obsession. It was the subject of 1976's highly successful Carrie, and he has returned to it again in The Fury.

This time his story concerns a young man (Andrew Stevens) and a young woman (Amy Irving) who are gifted with extrasensory perception as well. That makes them doubly interesting to a supersecret Government agency, which seeks to exploit their gifts in the interest of "national security." After the youth is spectacularly abducted by these spooks, his father (Kirk Douglas) traces him to Chicago, where he manages to find the girl and enlist her telepathic aid in finding his son. Unfortunately, the G-men are just a step behind--and ahead--of both of them.

It's all terribly complicated, but also very exciting. De Palma's staging amounts to a movie-long chase that is witty, crisp and suspenseful. The film ends with terrible vengeance upon all who attempted to exploit these strangely gifted children. That ending does not quite match Carrie's, perhaps because the picture as a whole does not work as powerfully on one's emotions. The reason is that Carrie herself existed in an ordinary milieu, a middle-class high school. The contrast between it and her "talent" was vivid. Then, too, Carrie was such a plain mousy little thing, so set upon by her peers that one derived vengeful satisfaction when she--literally--brought the house of her tormentors down around them. By contrast, The Fury exists from the start in the fictional world of movies and paperbacks -- a place where secret agents, car chases and shootouts are routine. In that context, psychokinesis requires no greater dislocation than James Bond's latest bit of fanciful hardware.

Still, The Fury is fine popular entertainment. Kirk Douglas, as the father, mobilizes a kind of crazy energy he has not displayed since he was a much younger actor; John Cassavetes is deliciously evil as the bureaucrat-villain. De Palma, like Alfred Hitchcock, is a superb technician, sure and subtle in such matters as camera placement and editing. These are skills that are often overlooked when they are not employed in the service of "serious" themes.

There is another analogy to Hitchcock. In entertainment after entertainment he has shown, through his spies and criminals, how pervasive evil is in the world, how it can reach out and touch the most innocent places and people and make real the paranoia that so many people seem to feel. The Fury invites the audience to take pleasure in the revenge of those who are exceptional, in their final, violent turning against the straight world. One suspects that telepathic characters are artist-figures to De Palma, that conceivably, in his dealings with Hollywood producers, he has wished on occasion he had psychokinetic powers. Be that as it may, The Fury can be enjoyed, by those prepared for some colorful blood spillage when the kids get riled, simply as an engrossing thriller.

-- Richard Schickel

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