Word: villainizing
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...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...
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...
...think pump of Engine is Charles Lang (Dwight Schultz), who has devised a method for producing energy by splitting the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water. That amorphous villain, Big Biz, sends two oily agents (David Sabin and Bill Moor) to intimidate Lang out of his invention. When he resists, they murder him and his sister (Patti LuPone...
...Cliche ("Let's Do It"); it's 2078, after all. As far as I could discern from the production notes, the main plot-line consists of a mad grab by three Human Cliches (or were they Human Puns?)--a Harvard student, a Man/Woman from Outer Space, and a Diabolical Villain with Madison Avenue Experience--for the right to be the last person cloned on Earth, and cloned with a vengeance at that--1000 times, hence the title. A "big push" for conventional sex, which either has been--or is about to be--completely supplanted by the more efficient, and presumably...
...York, he takes his special brand of egomania over to professional wrestling. The time is the early '50s. when the sport was a TV staple and a man with an arresting gimmick could become a star. Andy flops as a clean-cut hero and a rough-cut villain (in Nazi helmet and Hitler mustache), then finally reaches apotheosis as a Gorgeous George type - golden curls, campy cape, mincing manner...