Monstervision Host Segments for
The Fury
(1978)SEEIN' RED AND THEN SOME
If you like to watch exploding bodies and people bleeding through every pore in their body, then look no further than this Brian De Palma thriller which stars Andrew Stevens as an innocent pawn in a top secret experiment. Like Carrie, De Palma's previous film, The Fury continues the director's fascination with telekinesis and features two major characters who possess this unique talent: one benign, the other monstrous. The cast also includes Amy Irving, Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes and Fiona Lewis, who gets transformed into a spinning top.
In an article on the making of The Fury by Sam L. Irvin, Jr. for Cinefantastique, Ms. Lewis commented on her ill-fated character prior to the filming of the scene: "I am not sure I am looking forward to shooting those scenes. Luckily, a dummy, other than myself, will be used in certain shots. They have already made it. For three days, four hour sessions each day, I had my entire body cast by the special effects people. They cast my arms, then my legs, then my body: I wore a bathing suit, of course - they didn't need an exact replica of everything! They did my head and put it all together. It was really weird. You cannot imagine what it is like to walk into a room and see yourself hanging from a hook."
In addition to the elaborate special effects, three highly renowned make-up artists were brought in for this project. William Tuttle, Oscar winning make-up artist for Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, said, "Each one of us has a sort of specialty. Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London) is doing the bleeding hand, Cassavetes' head and dummy and Fiona's body. Dick Smith (The Exorcist) has designed the pulsating veins for the forehead, a scratch across the face, a bleeding nose, a scar. But Dick Smith could only serve as a consultant because he is working on another picture. He came in before the picture started shooting, and worked out all these special effects, made them, and then left to fulfill his other commitment. So, I was called in to cover everything during the shooting. I am applying Dick's designs and when I run into technical difficulties, I come up with something on my own that will be effective. A. D. Flowers is also working on the picture: he is doing the rotating, the spinning of Fiona, all the explosions, fire, levitations and all."
Okay, enough about the beautifully orchestrated mayhem. Here's Joe Bob Briggs with those drive-in totals:
"The Fury" Intro
[host segments continued from Phantasm II] "Well, I'm Joe Bob Briggs, and up next we have "The Fury," the
film Brian DePalma made after Carrie and is sorta like "Carrie" but
everybody dumped on it as being cheap far-fetched exploitation, which of
course is why I like it. But first I wanna remind you that next week we
have the comedy-horror-Indian Voodoo-thriller with the fancy title of
House IV, and another sequel they just slapped a number onto, Hidden
II.
Anyway, let's go right into "The Fury," from 1978. A
top-secret government agency kidnaps young people with psychokinetic
powers and trains them as secret weapons, but they shouldn't of messed
with Kirk Douglas's son. And those drive-in totals are:
Twenty-nine dead bodies.
One machine-gun battle.
Multiple
psychic nosebleeds.
Redneck-trussing.
Two motor vehicle chases,
with crash and burn.
Exploding pontoon boat.
One killer amusement
park ride.
Bullet to the forehead.
Bloody psychiatrist-spinning.
One attack dog.
One exploding government agent.
Kung Fu.
Biofeedback Fu.
Plate-glass window Fu.
Four stars. I like
this movie. Check it out, and we'll be hanging with you the rest of the
night.
[fading] We will have a visit from the Mail Girl during this
flick. If she ever decides to show up. Where's Rusty? Is she over there in
the next studio flirtin with the Public Access people? Tell her to get her
hiney back over here."
"The Fury" Commercial Break #1
"Wait. I'm getting psychic
signals. A blonde named Heather wants to have sex with me. Heather, I'm in
radio contact. Yes! I feel exactly the same way. No, I'm sure I would love
your cat. Yes, of course I love the ballet. How do you KNOW I'm lying?
Yes, your mother would like me. Heather, why do you have electrolysis
three times a week? Heather, forget it, okay? See, the problem when you're
psychic is that you find out stuff you don't WANNA know. It's funny, Amy
Irving decided to do some homework when she got the part in "The Fury." So
she went to this special school in Westwood, near UCLA, where they do
biofeedback. And she emptied all her thoughts, just like in the scene we
just watched, with the electric train, and after about three hours, she
started to "get in touch" with her psychic energy, and the people at the
school said, "How would you like to direct that psychic energy," and she
decided to use it . . . to lose weight to get in shape for her big bikini
scene! And as we can see, she SUCCEEDED. Brian DePalma kept his camera on
those bikini butts for a LONG time there. So see, this stuff really does
work. Back to the psychic espionage comedy horror thriller, "The
Fury."
[fading] I actually HATE getting in touch with my psychic
energy. No I'm NOT gay. Well, you can take your chartreuse muscle shirt
and cram--oh you'd LIKE that, wouldn't you? Please, pull up those fuzzy
ankle socks and strut right out of my energy field, okay? Some people.
You'll never know! I'm fine."
"The Fury" Commercial Break #2
"Is this a comedy or a
horror flick? It's both, isn't it? The Catholic church got real upset over
that scene where Kirk Douglas ties up the old couple. This movie was on
the "condemned" list of the U.S. Catholic Conference, not approved for
Catholic viewing, because it depicted "an aging couple trapped in a
crime-ridden environment and obliged to care for a disabled mother as
comic relief." The Catholics always have a problem with horror flicks.
Like, when William Peter Blatty was writing The Exorcist, the church
cooperated with him. They cooperated with the making of the film, to make
sure the exorcism rite was done correctly. And then a lot of Catholics
CONDEMNED it after it came out. And they weren't too fond of Rosemary's
Baby, where Mia Farrow is a Catholic girl who gives birth to the devil's
spawn. But it wasn't Mia's fault. She was DRUGGED the whole time. It was
John Cassavetes' fault. He was cooperating with the witches. And here he
is again, John Cassavetes as the evil government agent, kidnapping Kirk
Douglas's son, making the Catholic church upset. Maybe John Cassavetes is
the problem. You see John Cassavetes in a flick, you KNOW the devil can't
be too far away. Kirk Douglas spent his whole career playing meanies, so
they had to have somebody EVEN MEANER in this movie so that Kirk could be
the good guy. Okay, enough about Catholics. I gotta stop talking about
Catholics cause every time I say something they write in. We LOVE
Catholics here at "MonsterVision." ALL the great horror flicks are
Catholic. The Pope's a helluva guy. Roll it.
[fading] He's
infallible. Never makes a mistake. What if he got Alzheimer's and forgot
two of the disciples? There would be ten disciples, right? What if he made
up a new commandment? "Thou shalt lie down with the lamb." They'd have to
write it in the book. Infallible. Of course, they already do that in East
Texas. And they're Baptist."
"The Fury" Commercial Break #3
"Kirk Douglas is a little
bit of a Loony Tune, isn't he? Why does he drive the car into Lake
Michigan after he's already escaped? I didn't get that part. That was one
of the GOOFIEST car chases ever filmed. And now he's getting some nookie
in a hippie van. With Carrie Snodgress. This was Carrie Snodgress's
comeback role, in her hometown of Chicago. She was nominated for an Oscar
in 1970 for "Diary of a Mad Housewife," which was only her second film,
and then she just dropped out of sight. She didn't work for eight years.
Most of that time she was living with the singer Neil Young--they had a
son together, although they never got married, and she said that taking
care of Neil and her son was more interesting than acting. But then they
broke up and she changed her mind. Her comeback film was SUPPOSED to be
"Rocky." They wanted to hire her, but her agent asked for too much money,
so they hired Talia Shire instead, and so she ended up in the road company
of the play "Vanities," and that's where Brian DePalma saw her and hired
her for "The Fury." She never really had another big hit film. She made a
lot of B movies in the eighties--she was in "Murphy's Law," one of the
best Charles Bronson movies. She starred on Broadway in "A Coupla White
Chicks Sitting Around Talking." And sometimes you'll see her on TV--she
turns up in The X Files and "Chicago Hope." Anywho, right now she's got
the hots for Kirk Douglas, and she'll do ANYTHING to help him find his
son. Anything. Don't you love it when a woman says that? Roll
it.
[fading] It's happened to me! I've had a woman say "I'll do
anything you want, Joe Bob." . . . Yeah, she was a hooker. . . . Kinda
large. . . . No, she didn't weight 300 pounds. . . . Two hundred
tops."
"The Fury" Commercial Break #4
"Speaking of people who are
"sensitized to the bioplasmic universe"--don't you love it when they make
up this scientific language in telepathy movies? "We must explore her
power to psychomotrize." Anyway, [enters] it's time for "Joe Bob's Jail
Break" with the TNT Mail Girl, and I think--oh my God, I just got an
EXTREMELY strong psychic hit from you.
MAIL GIRL:
Really?
Let me see your palm.
MAIL GIRL: [giving him hand]
Oh, yes, very original.
What.
MAIL GIRL: Like every hard-up
guy in every bar in the country hasn't done this before.
I don't
know what you're talking about.
MAIL GIRL: Now you're gonna tell me
I wanna have sex with you, right?
No, I was gonna tell you you
DON'T want to have sex with me.
MAIL GIRL: You had to look at my
palm for that, huh?
The palm is very telling. I see you're
romantic. You like to travel.
MAIL GIRL: [getting drawn in] That's
true.
You drive a red Miata with a small dent in the rear
bumper.
MAIL GIRL: You got that from my palm?
And you THINK
you don't want to have sex with me, but you really DO want to have sex
with me.
MAIL GIRL: [taking hand back] Okay, nice try.
What?
It's all right there.
MAIL GIRL: Here's a letter from R.W. Nelson
at the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite, Oklahoma.
Dear Joe
Bob,
"My cellie and I were going to watch 'The Monster Club' on
MonsterVision tonight, but we decided against it when we found out that it
was full of gay-acting b******s. Anyway, when channel-surfing a moment
ago, we stopped changing channels to watch the MonsterVision Mail Girl sit
idly by while you blabbed on about something or other. The heaving of her
half-bare breasts distracted us for a moment, but we still managed to hear
you say that in the next segment of the movie there would be a woman
singing about how great it was to be a stripper, and also the censors
would slip up and let a couple of GRAND TITONS slip through! We watched
your stupid-ass British movie for 30 minutes looking for Grand Titons, but
there never were any! If you were talking about that silhouette woman who
turned into a damned skeleton, I'm gonna whup your #@!* ass!
"I
want to see Titons that you promised me! Where are the Titons? TITONS! You
cheated me and my cellie, you dumb b******. You can't promise Titons to
convicts and not deliver immediately.
"Show me
Titons!
"Okay, here's the deal:
(1) Either show the Titons like you
promised, or
(2) have the MonsterVision Mail Girl wear a G-string, do
jumping jacks, challenge the world-champion female mud wrestler, and wear
wet T-shirts!
"Although I know you probably won't be able to do all
that, I thought your dumb, hillbilly ass would be glad to know what
exactly I thought about you lying to us! Maybe you'll think twice next
time, lick boy!
"Yours truly,
"Peepaw, (R.W. Nelson
#243602)
"Oklahoma State Reformatory, Granite, Oklahoma.
Well,
Peepaw, I can see that you're benefiting greatly from the new Inmate
Sensitivity Training. AND you've successfully repressed those homosexual
impulses. Your mother will be proud. I'll talk to Rusty about your
demands, but she's a pretty tough negotiator, so don't get your hopes up.
All right, Oklahoma State Reformatory is located in Granite, Oklahoma;
population 1200, so basically it's the prison staff and their spouses. 814
male inmates, which is sort of an intimate setting for a prison. But
Peepaw, when I say "intimate," I don't mean in a sexual way. [to Rusty]
He's obviously threatened by that concept, so we don't want to imply that
he might be gay.
MAIL GIRL: Not unless you want me doing naked
jumping jacks with a gun to my head.
Oh, how I wish I could have my
cake and not end up at the bottom of a river somewhere in Oklahoma.
Peepaw, thanks for writin in. We love a captive audience. Free your mind
and your butt will follow. [to Rusty] And I also forgot to mention that
you want to bring your best-looking friend along with you.
MAIL
GIRL: I could get into that.
You could?
MAIL GIRL:
Sure.
Really?
MAIL GIRL: Really.
When?
MAIL
GIRL: I'll call him right after the show. [leaves]
What did I
say?"
"The Fury" Commercial Break #5
Brian DePalma is one of
those directors, you either love him or you hate him. The French love him.
Kinda makes you wanna hate him, doesn't it? The people who REALLY hate him
say that he just rips off Alfred Hitchcock in every movie he makes. But
this movie came out when he was RIDING HIGH after "Carrie." It was his
10th film, but he hadn't been a really big-deal director until "Carrie."
And the critics jumped all over this movie and said all he was doing was
making "Carrie" again, but making it more complicated. But the public
didn't care. The public went to the movie, supported the movie, had a good
time at the movie, and that's why we're showing it here at
"MonsterVision," because this is the place where the public rules. Well,
actually, that's not true. Ted rules. But I would think that everybody
agrees by now that Brian DePalma is a great director. "Mission:
Impossible"--everybody loved that, right? Well, no. "Carlito's Way." Bad
example. Then you've got that whole "Bonfire of the Vanities" thing. Woof!
"The Untouchables"--THAT was a good one. Sort of. "He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue." Let's talk about
something else. Let's just watch the movie. I had a point and I lost
it--hate when that happens.
[fading] John Williams did the score
for this movie, by the way. John Williams, of Star Wars fame. Of course,
John Williams also did the score for "Bachelor Father" and Gilligan's
Island. I'm thinking too much. I'm in one of those on-the-one-hand
on-the-other-hand moods. Don't you just HATE IT when you see both sides of
something? No? You guys never relate to my intellectual quandaries, do
you?"
"The Fury" Commercial Break #6
"Arabs sailing through a
plate glass window--always good for a laugh. But I wanna talk about Fiona
Lewis, the femme fatale who keeps Andrew Stevens in sexual slavery. Two
words: Yum My. Remember her big spread in Playboy? Whoa! You know whose
girlfriend she was when she was making this movie? Buck Henry. Gives you
new respect for Buck, right? They don't call him "Buck" for nothing, do
they? Fiona Lewis has all the right moves to make Andrew Stevens wanna
PLEASE her. It's our worst nightmare, right? We think we've scored the
greatest-looking babe in the world, and she turns out to be . . . milking
us for all we've got. Now. What do we do, guys, when this happens? We go
back for MORE SEX. It's SICK. It's disgusting. We're better than that. She
doesn't deserve us. She's using us. She's no good. But GET A LOAD OF THOSE
YABOS. Okay, roll film.
[fading] I shouldn't say "yabos." Get a
load of those snow-cones. Get a load of those howitzers. All right, that's
enough. I don't wanna be disrespectful toward women. Get a load of those
flesh melons. . . . Get a load of those Winnebagos. That's enough. . . .
Get a load of those human tetherballs. . . . Get a load of those Twin Peaks."
"The Fury" Commercial Break #7
"Issur Danielovitch Demsky,
a Russian Jew better known as . . . Kirk Douglas, who we just saw in his
big emotional scene in "The Fury," and if you think he looks a little OLD
in this movie, let it be known that he was far from finished. He was 63
when he made this, but he did 22 more films AFTER this movie. Anyway, this
was Kirk Douglas's 62nd film, and it was Amy Irving's THIRD. Her TV debut
was in 1975 in an episode of "Police Woman," and her first film was called
"I'm a Fool" in 1976, but the first time she was noticed was in Brian
DePalma's breakthrough film, "Carrie," also in 1976, in which she plays
Sue, the classmate who talks her boyfriend into being Prince Charming for
a night and taking Carrie to the prom. DePalma liked her in that role, so
he used her in "The Fury." He also liked Nancy Allen in "Carrie," the
truly EVIL Girl who dumps the pig's blood on Carrie--and he MARRIED her.
By the way, in case you haven't heard, they're making "Carrie 2"--this
time Amy Irving is the gym teacher and some NEW girl gets her period in
the shower. Katt Shea, who directed the great Poison Ivy is directing
it. What was my point? Oh yeah, Kirk Douglas was nominated for Oscars
three times--"Lust For Life," "The Bad and the Beautiful" and
"Champion"--and Amy Irving was nominated one time: "Yentl." What's wrong
with this picture? Roll it.
[fading] The immortal "Yentl." How is
that possible? Of course, by then she didn't care, because she was married
to Steven Spielberg. It didn't last, but she got a cozy little divorce
settlement of 80 million dollars. "Amy, the relationship is not working
out--would 80 mill tide you over?"
"The Fury" Commercial Break #8
"Well, we got a LITTLE bit
too bloody for TNT in that last sequence, so we had to take out eight
seconds of Fiona Lewis spewing guts all over the furniture. We have pretty
strict gut-spewing standards, and the censors will let you have a little
gore here and there, but not the whole nine yards. Every single person in
this movie is NASTY, including the people you're supposed to like. Even
Andrew Stevens--you don't have THAT much sympathy for him at this point.
Andrew was 22 years old when he made this, and he was mostly known for
being the son of Stella Stevens. Of course, Andrew would go on in later
years to co-star 97 times with Shannon Tweed in movies made for Showtime
and normally seen only on pay-per-view hotel channels. So he was kinda
warming up for his true calling in life, when he worked with the sexy
Fiona Lewis, in "The Fury." And now for the thrilling conclusion of the
Brian DePalma flick that the critics hated, the public kinda liked, and
history has . . . forgotten. Roll it.
[fading] When this came out,
Twentieth Century-Fox claimed that it was based on real events, that the
KGB and the CIA were racing to see who could use telepathy as a weapon.
Try to win a war by sending brainwaves through a TV screen and harming the
brains of whoever was watching. Which, come to think of it, is what we do
here on "MonsterVision" every week. But let's not go there."
"The Fury" Outro
"As far as I know, that was the first time
that anybody exploded an entire human being on screen. John Cassavetes in
millions and millions of pieces, in a special effect that David Cronenberg
certainly would have admired. Congrats to the TNT censors for letting us
see that. But here's what I don't understand. Andrew Stevens dies because
Kirk Douglas loses his grip and he falls off the roof. But two minutes
before that he was levitating himself all over the place. He didn't NEED
anybody to hold him up. And then why does Kirk Douglas kill himself? He's
already bonded with the girl. He's abandoning her. And what's with the
glowing-blue-eye effect? It looks like something from an episode of The
Incredible Hulk. So it gets all weird there at the end, but still an
underrated movie, I think--Brian DePalma's "The Fury."
And next
week on "MonsterVision" we're showing House IV. If you didn't see "House
3," check it out anyway, cause it's got one of the biggest gross-out
scenes you'll ever see on TNT. And we'll follow that up with the alien
good-cop/bad-cop masterpiece "Hidden II."
That's it for me, Joe Bob
Briggs, reminding you that everyone has a photographic memory, but some
don't have film.
Did you guys hear the one about the woman who
wakes up in the middle of the night and finds her husband missing from
bed? She gets up and starts checking the house. As she's looking around
for him, she hears sobbing from the basement. She goes down the stairs and
finds her husband curled up into a little ball, sobbing. She says to him,
"Honey, what's wrong?" And he says, "Remember twenty years ago, when I got
you pregnant? And your father threatened me to either marry you or to go
to jail?" And the woman says, "Yes, of course." And the guy says, "I would
have been released tonight."
Joe Bob Briggs reminding you that the
drive-in will never die.
[fading] Woman goes into a supermarket and
buys one bar of soap, one toothbrush, one tube of toothpaste, one loaf of
bread, one pint of milk, one single serving cereal, and one frozen dinner.
The guy at the checkout looks at her and says, "Single are you?" The woman
says, very sarcastically, "How did you know?" And the guy says, "Cause
you're ugly."
Host segments for next week's MonsterVision movies: House IV, and Hidden II
Host segment transcript of broadcast
©1999 Turner Network Television. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Legal/Privacy Notice about this site.
