I’m generally positive on the current state of film culture, at least on the audience end.  Thanks to organizational hubs like Letterboxd, Discord, and the podcast circuit, it’s easier to find a wider cultural discussion on the niche cinematic artifacts I care about now than ever before in my lifetime, which leaves a lot of room for sharing & discovery outside the traditional print-media forum.  Growing up, my familiarity with movie titles was determined by video store curation and magazine articles, but now there’s an infinite supply of Movie Discourse to delve into in all directions, if you care to look.  It’s a blessing in terms of expanding the public library of accessible titles, but it can also be a little exhausting when it comes to those films’ analysis.  Pinpointing what every movie is really “about” (i.e. Grief, Trauma, Depression, Isolation, etc.) gets to be a little tiresome over time, since it feels more like solving a literary puzzle than indulging in the art of the moving image on its own terms.  Every modern film discussion tends to boil down to deciphering metaphor or interpreting the career-span mission statement of an auteur.  As a civilian with a movie blog, I’m among the guiltiest participants in that constant ritual, and I genuinely don’t know how to stop compounding the problem with my own inane analysis of every movie I watch.  How else could I justify logging all this stuff on Letterboxd?

The shot-on-video martial arts cheapie Furious is a huge relief in that modern context.  A subprofessional, no-budget production from wannabe Hollywood stuntmen before they worked their way into the industry proper, it’s the exact kind of vintage cinematic artifact you never would have encountered in the wild unless it happened to be stocked at your specific neighborhood video store.  Now, it’s accessible for streaming on several free-without-subscription platforms, backed by thousands of glowing Letterboxd reviews highlighting it as an overlooked gem.  Better yet, it’s a film that sidesteps the need for any concrete analysis, since its story was obviously figured out in real time during its month-long shoot, purpose or meaning be damned.  It’s all supernatural martial-arts nonsense that’s so light on plot & dialogue and so heavy on for-their-own-sake magic tricks that it plays less like a metaphorical puzzle to solve than it is a meandering dream dubbed direct to VHS.  Sleight-of-hand card tricks and droning synths pull the audience into the opening credits with a chintzy sense of mystery, followed by 70 minutes of incoherent action adventure across the cliffs and rooftops of sunny California, with no particular destination in mind.   Furious is much more concerned with convincing you that its stuntmen are jumping to their deaths from great heights or that its evil sorcerers are casting actual magic spells than it is concerned with filmic abstraction or metaphor.  It’s illusion without allusion, the perfect salve for modern film discourse.

In the opening sequence, a nameless warrior fights off attackers through some very careful cliffside choreo while attempting to operate what appears to be a magic tusk, as it spins like a compass.  It’s unclear where that compass is meant to lead her, since she’s soon overcome by combatant goons, who then bring the magic tusk to a sorcerer who runs a karate dojo out of a nearby 80s office building.  The fallen warrior’s brother leaves his own mountainside dojo to investigate and avenge his sister’s death, which throws him into the middle of a wide conspiracy involving wizards and, possibly, aliens.  Really, he just punches & kicks his way through a series of fights until he works his way up to the Big Bad, occasionally stopping to gawk at screen-illusion magic tricks, like the Big Bad’s ability to levitate or the main henchman’s ability to shoot live chickens out of his hands like bullets.  Nothing about Furious makes much linear, narrative sense, but its curio collection of spinning tusks, severed heads, flaming skeletons, and so, so many chickens has its own distinct sense of magic to it.  Our hero’s loopy revenge mission recalls the SOV surrealism of Tina Krause’s Limbo – Lynchian in the sense that they’re better enjoyed at face value than they are as 1:1 metaphors that can be unlocked through critical interpretation.  Furious just happens to feature more punching, kicking, and stunt falls than Limbo, along with more bright California sunshine.

The “remastered” version of Furious currently available on most streaming platforms still looks like it was dubbed over an already-used VHS, which only adds to its charm as a vintage martial-arts novelty.  Its narrative incoherence is also echoed in its editing style, in which every shot is either one beat too short or one beat too long, constantly keeping its rhythm off-balance.  The fight choreography is just as precise as the editing is sloppy, however, with each punch & kick sharply delivered on-target.  If I were to put on my 2020s movie blogger thinking cap, I’d say that the film’s narrative and editing incoherence reflects the protagonist’s hazy, disjointed mind as he recovers from the grief of his sister’s sudden death.  Really, though, the movie just kicks ass because the fights look cool and there’s a wizard who shoots chickens out of his hands.  It’s not that complicated.

-Brandon Ledet