Theme Song: Credits indicate there was a theme song, “Certain Fury,” by Tony Prendatt, but I guess I wasn’t paying attention or somehow missed it. My apologies.
Interesting Dated References: A grown man living in a trendy loft having like 5 boxes of cereal, including Pac-Man Cereal.
Best Line: Wow, considering Certain Fury was R-rated but generally targeted toward teenage girls, there’s some pretty intense dialogue, most of it misogynistic or racist: “Bitches – I hope they die in that sewer,” “Get this bleeding bitch off my boat,” Tatum O’Neal says the N-word a few times.
Social Context: What the hell was with the super-aggressive crime movies in the mid-80s featuring teenage heroines getting into some seriously deep shit? Was it simply a matter of male audiences being more receptive to middling crime thrillers if the antagonists were teenage girls? This movie would make a great double feature with Scream For Help in that they’re both really violent and oddly intense for films featuring female teenage protagonists.
Summary: Scarlet (Tatum O’Neal, The Bad News Bears, Little Darlings, Paper Moon, Dancing with the Stars) and Tracy (Irene Cara, The Electric Company) are together in court on unrelated charges when some other female criminals stage a massive fucking bloodbath that results in like 45 dead cops.
It’s insanity. Through happenstance, Scarlet and Tracy escape and are then, brace for ‘80s-movie cliche, chased into the FUCKING SEWER and pursued for like 30 minutes by some cop that eventually gets tangled up underwater and dies, thereby making the girls feel guilty for not saving him.
Eventually the girls make it above ground and start to do the buddy-comedy, “We don’t like each other thing,” going so far as to have Tatum’s character say things like, “For a [N-word], you’re stupider than you look.” 1986, it’s was a different time.
So eventually our reluctant duo ends up at the house of “Sniffer,” played by David Cronenberg mainstay Nicholas Campbell, who is some type of ex-love interest of Scarlet. Immediately upon arriving, Scarlet and Sniffer start Frenching despite the fact that she is saturated with, and just spent 30 minutes inhaling, raw sewage. Sniffer, despite his nickname, doesn’t even see fit to remark on it.
Sniffer then kicks Scarlet out and tries to take a shower with Tracy who responds by practically beaiting him to death. Seriously, these chicks are super intense.
After a brief interlude in which Scarlet tries to work out some prostitution deal with Peter Fonda (High Ballin’, Spasms, The Hostage Tower), the girls take all of Sniffer’s drugs and try to sell them at an opium den inside of a gigantic old wooden building entirely lit by, holy shit, FUCKING CANDLES.
The setpieces in this movie are fucking insane. The candle budget must have been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I’m having so much anxiety. This set is so old looking and there are so many open flames. Jesus, take the wheel!
So Sniffer shows up to possibly drug Tracy and also reclaim his stash, but before any of that can happen, they stomp on Sniffer’s genitals a bunch, over which the sound engineers decide to repeatedly hit the “Tearing Iceberg Lettuce” sound effect button.
The entire place goes up in flames, and the next morning the girls discover from a newspaper they are presumed dead. Then Scarlet calls Tracy a “stupid [N-word] bitch,” and they part ways. 30 seconds later, Scarlet is gunned down by the cops and Tracy shrieks in agony for her dead friend who had literally just called her a “stupid [N-word] bitch.” Intense.
Worth Mentioning:
– Directed by Stephen Gyllenhall of Maggie and Jake fame.
– The promotional campaign for Certain Fury let O’Neal and Cara’s Oscar wins do a lot of the heavy lifting, despite O’Neal’s dating back to when she was a child, and Cara’s being for music.
– George Murdock from Breaker, Breaker plays a cop here.
Poster and Box Art: The theatrical poster was pretty tame, but dig the high-contrast image overlay.
This poster also includes the righteous wordmark that’s surprisingly effective.
The home video release art has a nice object collage that is also done well.
And, because people thought this movie was going to be hot shit, there are like ten different alternate/foreign posters.
Seriously leaning into that Oscar nod. And this Italian one really puts a lot of importance on the five-minute scene involving Peter Fonda by giving him third billing.
Availability: Blu-ray, but doesn’t appear to be streaming.
I used to have this one on vhs, wasn’t a bad watch the first time round but didn’t hold up on repeated viewings. That court scene at the beginning is nuts