Our penchant to escape into movies, books, and fantasies because the world we live in isn’t as satisfying as it should be can drive some into untapped realms of new creation. Occasionally, one of these fictional destinations can be a realm of undiluted, unremarkable, undecipherable crap. Furious is one of those places. An unexplored dimension populated by sorcerers, whispering statues, fat warriors and lots of live chickens. Furious is something, and it is also nothing. What we have here is a horrible onslaught on the concept of cinematic storytelling gone bad.
A somber introduction thrusts us into what appears to be a medieval age with Mongols rabidly chase a mystical woman through mountainous terrain. A mysterious tusk she holds points her away from danger, but the pursuers close in. She reaches her destination, a remote cave with a plastic skull and a cigar box. She manages to fend off one attacker by throwing two ninja stars into his butt, but she’s tragically overpowered and destroyed.
From there, the tale seems to continuously introduce oddball after oddball after another, along with some kind of kung-fu academy strictly for fat children. There could be some kind of narrative thread that pushes the camera onward, but it’s far too thin or boring for me to care after ten minutes. Furious has no right to exist. But it does. There’s no fathoming its creation; it’s a movie with 10,000 ideas but zero story.
Filming a feature on 35mm is expensive, and so is a giant, fire-breathing dragon with entire human skeletons between its teeth. I suppose money is no object when reality is no option. The only remaining explanation is that it must have sprung fully formed from some spiritual and intellectual void, a starving chasm of chaotic darkness that feeds off the shock and confusion of human viewers. I don’t shy away from the fact that this was created in the same decade as other fantasy-addled flicks were out there like Conan, Beastmaster and other of this ilk, but they had fathoms more to offer than this dubbed disaster.
Writer/director Tim Everitt would soon go off to much, much better things. But regarding Furious…save your money and check out the infinitely better Kung Fury instead.
