Word: depalma
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...MARQUIS DE SADE should be alive today. DePalma and DeSade would make a brilliant director-screenwriter team. In Brian DePalma's latest thriller, The Fury, Fiona Lewis plays a high-class, whorish British bitch-doctor whose titillating, condescending blue eyes make you want to punch her in the nose. Hitchcock would have let Cary Grant do just that--assuming that we in the audience are all voyeurs--and in his later days would have sent her to his legendary shower. DePalma, characteristically, goes further. In one of many representative sequences in The Fury, Robin (Andrew Stevens), Lewis's jealous lover...
Whether or not DePalma's perversities appeal to you, and you have nothing to be ashamed of if they don't, you must at least concede that he's flamboyant, like his protagonist in The Phantom of Paradise a virtuoso gone ga-ga, which puts him far ahead of literal-minded bores like Richard Donner and Michael Crichton. His last film, Carrie, was a gory, silly, outrageous, and incredibly beautiful piece of movie-making--far more structured, spare, and cohesive than The Fury, and unfortunately, a far more satisfying movie...
...Fury should have been DePalma's goony epic. The ingredients include a pair of telekinetic teenagers (double Carrie's load), nefarious international spy organizations, a dastardly Bond-style villain, a goofily bloated score by John Williams, a delightfully eccentric group of players, and a mammoth budget--courtesy of schlock-producer Frank Yablans. The movie fails not because it's so gory, and not even because DePalma cruelly lingers over the deaths of our favorite characters (although this is annoying), but because the storyline is so slack. Screenwriter John Farris has plotted the film with routine situations that are unworthy...
Cinderella's charmed evening is fated to end in disgrace, however. Her enemies engineer her election as prom queen, only to ruin her moment of triumph by dousing their unsuspecting victim with a vat of blood--an especially cruel reminder of the scene in the showers. DePalma has obviously deemed this moment as the climax of the film; he drags the viewer through an agonizing five-minute sequence shot entirely in slow motion. Discordant violin strains accompany the doomed couple as they ascend to the stage. The glow of Carrie's face pains us all the more as the camera...
...memorable image of a blood-soaked Carrie glaring upon the suddenly soundless ballroom marks the point where DePalma abandons all self-restraint. Gimmick piles upon gimmick as Carrie wreaks her vengeance; screens split, reddish tones suffuse the lens, a single shot multiplies into a revolving wheel of faces both shocked and gleeful. The film now develops into a full-scale assault upon the senses that ultimately gluts the viewer's mind with technique...