The Fury (1978)

The Fury is a supernatural horror thriller made in 1978 and which was directed by Brian De Palma and starring Kirk Douglas and Amy Irving. The screenplay of the film was written by John Farris, who also wrote the novel.

It is considered as one of the most underrated movies of Brian De Palma and a prelude to Scanners. It is also the second movie of Brian De Palma featuring telekinesis with Amy Irving acting in both movies.

Plot
Peter Sandza, a former CIA agent, is searching for his son, who was kidnapped by a secret intelligence organisation inside the CIA lead by Ben Childress. This organization kidnaps psychics to turn them into weapons in the service of the Unied States government. To achieve this, they also kill their families to have them in their grasp correspondingly, which "forced" them to try to kill Peter, too, an attempt which failed. Still they were able to gain the trust of his son, kidnap him and make him believe, that he was killed by Arab terrorists. After that they begin to systematically experiment with him to increase his powers and give him the ability to control them, experiments which are horrible for him, but is pushed to endure them anyway because of corresponding manipulations regarding his needs, which have no counterbalance because of his isolation.

During Peter´s search he encounters a teenage girl called Gillian, who is also a psychic, but is also afraid of her powers like Robin, since her powers also cause people around her to bleed. It is caused because of her extreme powerful electromagnetic brainwaves. For this reason she goes to the same institute, where Robin was in the hopes of finding a solution for that and which is controlled by Childress. and his agents. When they realise, that she is as strong as Robin and that she has telepathic contact with him, they also turn their eyes on her and also plan to do the same thing to her like they did to Robin. However, with the help of an internal employee in the institute, Hester, Peter manages to free her from their grasp and save her from their plans, in which Hester accidentally also dies. She agrees to help Peter find Robin, because he is like her and feels therefore  comfortable in his presence. Together they begin their search for Robin, who, in the meantime, has become more and more a psychopath because of the evil experiments they have done to harness his abilities and turn him into a weapon and killer.

They find him through Gillian´s abilities, but his mind is already in shambles and the near presence of Gillian, whom he had contact with telepathically, turns him into a monster out of fear he will be killed and replaced by her, a behaviour induced by their ruthless experiments. He dies, when his father, has to let him fall from the roof because of his behaviour, which became even more irrational, when he realises in full, how much they deceived, harmed and manipulated him to become, what he is now. Before he dies, however, he partially recovers his sanity, when he sees Gillian and transmits his attained powers and abilities to Gillian with the implied message to make sure with the powers he gave to her, that she will not end up like him and avenge him. When he dies, his father commits suicide. Childress, who arranged this fatal confrontation between father and son is happy about it, because they had both become a problem for him and because he had a corresponding replacement for Robin, Gillian.

The next morning Childress tries to manipulate Gillian in a similar way like he manipulated Robin, not knowing the depth of her knowledge regarding Robin and her newly attained powers. Realising what he really wants to do, the same as he did with Robin, she embraces her powers and attained powers she was afraid of, and decides to avenge Peter´s and Robin´s death, to whom she had become very close, by exploding his body from the inside out. Only his head is left intact

It is implied, that she then fiees from this organisation to protect herself and her mother from ending like Peter and Robin using her extreme powerful medium powers for that and with the detemination to protect others like her from this organisation, while also fighting aganst it.

Cast

 * Kirk Douglas as Peter Sandza
 * John Cassavetes as Ben Childress
 * Amy Irving as Gillian Bellaver
 * Carrie Snodgress as Hester
 * Charles Durning as Dr. Jim McKeever
 * Andrew Stevens as Robin Sandza
 * Fiona Lewis as Dr. Susan Charles
 * Carol Rossen as Dr. Ellen Lindstrom
 * Joyce Easton as Katherine Bellaver
 * Hilary Thompson as Cheryl
 * William Finley as Raymond Dunwoodie
 * Daryl Hannah as Pam

Production
Parts of this movie were filmed at Old Chicago of Bolingbrook, Illinois, a now defunct amusement park. The scene in which Kirk Douglas escapes the agents at the hotel was filmed at the now defunct Plymouth Hotel, the same hotel and room used in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers.

During the epilogue, an emotionally devastated Gillian takes her retribution on Childress and psychically blows him up – which is made all the more awesome by De Palma repeating the scene several times over in slow-motion (16 times to be exact) – and showing off the special effects by Rick Baker. Some say it is this finale that is the greatest finish for any villain ever.

Reception
The budget of the film was 7.5 million $ and it earned 24 million $ worldwide. Although the movie was successful, it didn´t become as successful as it was expected. While the movie was at the beginning not much appreciated by the critics at the time of its release, their attitude towards the film since then has been improving considerably.

Trivia

 * This was the first film for Daryl Hannah, Laura Innes and James Belushi (uncredited).
 * A big star like Kirk Douglas was cast as the lead in this film, because director Brian de Palma had felt, that his previous movie Carrie (1976) had suffered at the box-office without a name draw-card.
 * This movie was made and released about two years after its source novel of the same name by John Farris was first published in 1976. Farris was also the one, who wrote the screenplay for the film.
 * The throbbing vein the psychics have in the forehead, whenever they manifest their power, was also in the original script of Carrie (1976), but was cut from that film due to its limited budget.