the Car: (1977. dir: Eliot Silverstein) I'll be honest. I expected a hidden gem here. Instead, it's got everything you expect from a schlock 70s horror film: a silly idea, a bad script, stupid characters, lazy editing, a low budget, mediocre acting (not RG Armstrong, though; that guy always rocks); I could go on. However, it did one thing exactly right: the car itself.
The car gives an Oscar-worthy performance. It really does feel like a coldblooded, playing-with-its-food psychopath which has moments of terrifying tantrum freakout when it can't get its way. This being the 70s, we are never certain why this evil spirit erupted from the red canyons of Arizona, as we are never certain why it took the shape of a car. Does it have something to do with the Anton La Vey quote at the beginning? Probably not. None of this matters, though, because the car itself makes the movie worth watching, even with all the other stuff working against it.
*SPOILER ALERT*
the Fury: (1978. dir: Brian De Palma) You know what's fun? Watching John Cassavetes in movies like this. He never phones anything in, not that I've seen. He gives himself to this villain completely, seeming to take it as seriously as any role in his own great films. He is compelling to watch, and when he's speaking he makes the script seem better than it is. What a master, a magister tenebrarum in the shadowy art of cinema.
Now, the program notes: I started late with De Palma, and find myself generally restless with his movies, Blow Out being the only exception that leaps to the fore. (Bear in mind that I have yet to see Carrie, Carlito's Way and Dressed to Kill, among others.) In this one, he seems to have said to his actors, "Use a lot of bold hand gestures. Lots of them. I want to see your hands moving all the time, damnit." Or maybe it's a natural actors' mechanism, over-using hand gestures in a mad, last-ditch defense against our realizing the mediocre quality of lines they're having to speak.
The Fury was adapted by Robert Farris from his own novel (he wrote All Heads Turn When The Hunt Goes By, a classic horror tome which I found oddly disappointing, probably because the title is the paragon of titles, it cannot be matched, and so I was expecting food fit for gods behind it). The script doesn't quite find its grasp. The actors do what they can. De Palma has fun with the effects. The climactic image of Kirk Douglas finding his son in a darkened, burnt-out, blood-drenched room, hovering silently several feet above the floor, is effectively weird.
It's too long, this film, giving us a lot of filler we don't want, and the story more than once pulls out of focus into a kind of opaque I-guess-that-makes-sense leap-of-faith realm. It's an action film with horror elements (kids with scary psychokinetic powers that get out of hand). Kirk Douglas, probably sixty at the time, does his action hero thing, and that's alright, but Amy Irving, whose best talent is for hyper-emoting, and she does a vast deal of it here, has such a pretentious way of speaking that it takes at least half the film to bond with her. Her earnestness and ethereal beauty will win you if you stick with it, but then, alas, she gets a little kabuki in the end-scene (not in an interesting way like Isabelle Adjani in Possession, but in a kind of embarrassing way, like Winona Ryder in Dracula). Andrew Stevens is always a little scary, and one of the big set-pieces which does work very well involves his character walking in a fit of choler through a carnival, oblivious as electric lights explode when he passes.
Another of the grand set-pieces is the great escape scene, when Kirk Douglas is rescuing Amy Irving from her captivity. De Palma shows us the entire sequence in slow motion, some minutes long, with no sound except a bombast-score from John Williams (see * postscript for my tempered rant on that fellow). It is bold and, although not entirely successful, I applaud the effort.
The ending is abrupt, leaving us wondering what happens to the one character who's left standing. But when you think about it, how do you follow an exploding Cassavetes? You don't, and De Palma must have known that anything other than an immediate roll of credits would feel wan and sere in its wake.
* Personal aside on John Williams: apart from the music for Star Wars and Jaws, both obvious masterpieces, I would argue that this man was, in retrospect, a great scourge across the land in the '80s, his iron-clad dominance over movie-music an annoyance at best, his trademark sound become a cliche.
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