Pop Geeks’ Flashback Review: Furious
I was recently asked to review a 1984 karate movie called Furious. I have to admit that I was initially reluctant to offer my opinion on it, mainly because my own fiction writing experience is a poem published in a national anthology when I was in high school, Animaniacs and Pinky And The Brain fan-fiction written from my mid-teens to my early 20s, and sketches I wrote for a Saturday Night Live website, sketches that weren’t really comedic, but more expressions of the violent, depressed and unstable state my mind was in from when I was 19 to when I was 21. More germane to the issue, I had written reviews for an 80s movies website from 2002 to 2006, and since my own film-making experience was limited to a video I made for fun with a friend of mine I had in my younger days, in retrospect, I didn’t really have the right to call a movie good or bad. That’s why, with this review, I’ll talk about what I liked and what I didn’t about the movie.
Furious is a 1983 movie starring the Rhee brothers, Simon and Philip. In Furious, Simon is what TV Tropes would call the Danza, since his character is also named Simon. Simon is a young man whose sister, despite putting up a fight, died at the hands of several hunters. Simon, despite teaching a karate class of yount students, is something of a loner, as most of his friends either die or live to reveal themselves as not who they seem. Philip plays Chan, Simon’s old karate master and friend who is one of those who is not all he seems.
On the left is Simon. On the right is Chan.
The performing of magic tricks over the opening credits may seem unusual, but it’s key to the story, which involves fantasy ranging from transforming into animals to fighting on what the movie dubs “the astral plane”.
What do I think the movie’s weaknesses are? For me, there are two. First, although there is a decent amount of dialogue, this is a largely a wordless picture. I’m all about dialogue. It’s the writer in me. Maybe it’s because I’m more used to American action movies than karate movies, but I was expecting some pre-mortem one liners during the action scenes. Perhaps the filmmakers were afraid that large amounts of dialogue would take up too much time, which leads me to what I find to be the film’s second weakness. Even with the closing credits, the movie is only a little over 70 minutes long, and most of it is fight scenes. We don’t really get to know much about Simon or Chan, apart from the fact that Simon is a karate teacher who lost his sister and Chan feels that killing others will help him achieve immortality. Perhaps that’s all most viewers would need to know, but I would’ve liked to get to know more about the characters.
The movie does have strengths, though. The movie may have more fighting than dialogue, but the fights are well-done and take place in all sorts of surroundings. A particular highlight is a fight on a bridge where Simon takes on a large group of Chan’s mooks and knocks them off the bridge one by one, barely breaking a sweat as he does it. That may sound unrealistic, but this is a movie with heavy fantasy elements, so you just roll with it.
I feel that another of the movie’s strengths is the fantasy element. Along the way, we see characters flying, coming back from the dead to seek revenge, and becoming chickens, pigs and dragons. All movies have an element of fantasy, even documentaries. This isn’t a documentary, though…It’s a karate movie, and those types of films are not exactly known for realism. That’s what makes them so appealing to audiences, though…The idea that, if you take the time and have the patience to learn these skills, you, too, can kick ass and take names while keeping your cool.
In closing, would I recommend the movie? Despite my misgivings about the lack of dialogue and the relative brevity of the film’s length, I would recommend it as an example of how fantasy can become infused into any genre, including karate pictures. You’ll have a good time watching it, whether you genuinely enjoy these movies or watch them in an ironic way.
I reviewed this movie as an online screener. It’s being released on DVD on July 21st with a large amount of extras. Unfortunately, the online screener did not include those extras, but you can expect to find two original theatrical trailers and a director’s commentary on the disc.