Blind Fury *** (1989, Rutger Hauer, Terry O’Quinn, Brandon Call, Noble Willingham, Lisa Blount, Nick Cassavetes, Meg Foster) – Classic Movie Review 8865

Director Phillip Noyce’s 1989 Blind Fury stars Rutger Hauer as Nick Parker, a war-blinded samurai swordsman and Vietnam vet, who rescues Billy Devereaux (Brandon Call), the spoiled son of his old army buddy Frank Devereaux (Terry O’Quinn), from the Reno casino mob who have kidnapped him to force the chemist dad to make designer drugs. ‘Designer drugs, boy, wave of the future and as legal as whores and lawyers in this state!’

Nick promises the boy’s dying mother (Meg Foster) that he will get him home safely to dad, but the henchmen of crooked casino boss MacCready (Noble Willingham) are in hot pursuit.

Well cast and in his prime, Hauer finds much jokey humour and a lot of impressive action in this tough but poignant cross-country chase thriller. Blind Fury is just a B-movie, but it is a good one, with A-movie credentials. Charles Robert Carner’s script is a reworking of a Sixties Japanese screenplay about 1800s hero Zatoichi, by Ryôzô Kasahara.

Also in the cast are Brandon Call, Noble Willingham, Lisa Blount, Nick Cassavetes, Rick Overton, Randall ‘Tex’ Cobb, Meg Foster, Shô Kosugi (as the assassin), Paul James Vasquez, Charles Cooper, Alex Morris and Woody Watson.

It was a box office flop. Costing $10,000,000, it took only $2,692,000 in the US, with a cumulative worldwide gross of only $2,692,000.

The UK cinema release was cut by 22 seconds, with heavy edits to sword slashes in a fight scene to gain a 15 cinema certificate. The cuts are restored in the 18 video version, though a four-second cut removes a reference to the use of detergent in bomb making.

The blind Nick has a digital watch.

Brandon Call in Blind Fury (1989).

After 1994, Brandon Call dropped into obscurity. In 2006, he was living in San Diego, California, working at his parents’ gas station, and raising his seven-year-old daughter.

RIP Rutger Hauer (1944–2019).

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8865

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