In der Hitze von New York

Thankfully this moves along at a quick pace! Otherwise you might be forced to notice that the plot stinks, dialog is just terrible, and there's basically no point to making, let alone watching this film!

Things start out fine with a bombastic courtroom shootout, with a stack of bodies and gallons of blood. However, during the chaos, two other lesser criminals (O'Neal and Cara) somehow end up on the lam through the underside of the city.That's pretty much the plot. Throw in the twist (no spoiler): Cara is the suburbanite daughter of a doctor, and O'Neal is the tough street kid from the ghetto. (That's hardly noticeable these days, but probably raised one or two eyebrows back then!)

The film moves along from one absolutely stupid or unrealistic scene to the next. Side characters are thin and just ridiculous. Hard to tell who wins the acting award here... I noticed at least one other review here ripping on Cara and praising O'Neal; well, I beg to differ! Either O'Neal just can't deliver bad lines with a crappy director, or she's a terrible actor. Cara, meanwhile, seemed to be perfectly fine throughout (despite some terrible lines).

Go figure.

Watch it if you have a gut full of really bad beer and are bored out of your skull. Or not, and save what few brain cells you have left for something more engaging.

Never heard about this movie until today but it seems that 80s movies made by the likes of New World and other long forgotten about VHS fodder are finally being dumped onto streaming services. Movies that only until recently existed as video files ripped from grainy VHS and downloaded are now here in full HD.

This is yet another female clone of The Defiant Ones, a proto Thelma and Louse without the bad driving. We have Tatum O'Neil, a name I remember but not anything shes been in, and Irene Cara who was ridiculously pretty and not in enough stuff. Something to do with a lawsuit.. The story is that both girls end up in court by chance, and by further chance end up in court at the same time as two female gang members who are intent on shooting their way to freedom. Which is where the first shock of this movie appears, which is how violent and gory it is. This was a feature of many VHS movies, because they knew it would get people talking. However the level of violence is probably more severe than most movies today. The girls make a run for it and are pursued by the cops who think they were part of the shooting. What follows is typical 80's people on the run stuff, but with a heavily sleazy angle of violence against women and drugs. Its almost a woman in prison movie, just minus the prison.

Entertaining, but not if you want an easy watch.

It's like this:

Tatum as po' white trash. The Tuff Girrl. She smokes! She swears! She needs a new agent and quality time at a tanning salon!

Enter Irene "Fame" Cara. The Good Girrl. She's from Westchester! She wears GAP clothes! She once again shows us her negative-boobage in an unintentionally hysterical near-rape scene!

This turkey trots along like a how-to tutorial in camp & cliche, and the kitchen sink has been thrown in for good measure. We have a foot chase in the sewer-tunnels, a towering inferno in a crackwhore flophouse, the classic Peter Fonda boat scene, and a finale that had me spraying cherry Capri Sun from my nostrils. Hint: It's supposed to be sad but it's really a knee-slapper.

Not quite campy enough to be cult, "Certain Fury" can surely be found in a Blockbuster close-out bin... sandwiched somewhere between "Tuff Turf" and an Olsen Twin flick.

As noted by other IMDb users here, "Certain Fury" is essentially an updating of the Sidney Poitier / Tony Curtis movie "The Defiant Ones", though changing the sex of the central characters as well as adding gratuitous exploitation material. Nothing really wrong with that idea, at least if you are as big a fan of exploitation movies as I am, but the end results are only partially successful.

The movie gets off to a great start, being swift and packing in much exploitation and other good stuff. Though after the first thirty or so minutes, the movie becomes greatly uneven. There is some good stuff to follow, but they are bright moments lost in a suddenly slowing storyline. The movie almost gets boring at times because of this. Also, the ending is kind of weak, written and directed in a way that seems to come out of a much more serious movie than this.

Is the movie worth seeing? Well, if you are a patient fan of B movie exploitation, and you can see the movie cheaply or for free, then you'll probably get a reasonable amount of enjoyment out of it. If not, you'll probably be in the title state long before the movie reaches the ending.

You can just imagine how they tried to sell this one. Two Oscar winners Tatum O'Neal and Irene Cara team up together in this very trashy, b-grade urban action-thriller exploitation; a modernized mould of "THE DEFIANT ONES".

After a full-on, adrenaline-fueled first half-hour of courthouse slaughter, bullets spray the screen, panic erupts and bloody exchanges occur. Escaping that frenzy the girls end up in the city's sewers fighting the underground elements, running from the authorities who want their blood and getting on each other's nerves, as sparks fly between two prisoners that couldn't be any more different in all walks of life. On the run they go, trying to survive, being wrongly fingered as accomplices to what went down. One costly mishap after another puts both in dangerous predicaments on the dirty side of town.

I thought this was going to be great; formulaic, yeah, but what an excessive opening with strong stunt-work. Instead by the time it hit the halfway mark, it had already peaked. There it becomes uneven, the tension from then onwards (other than the crackhouse fight) had little impact as scenes go on longer than they should and eventually it meandered to the (lousy) finish line. Sometimes it wanted to have its cake and eat it too, dipping into both half-baked exploitation and serious drama. The latter does get manipulatively cheesy by trying to strike up an emotional chord; like the (unnecessary) scenes with one of the girl's father (Cara). Even the low-brow dialogues make it hard to take seriously. Although I did like the combination between O'Neal and Cara, even though the character details are predictably wear-worn, yet their interactions engage, from the callous remarks/or actions to their growing bond. Both stars weren't afraid to get down and dirty, but while not particularly likeable O'Neal did standout in her hardened, street smart hooker turn. Someone who didn't is a paycheck collecting Peter Fonda who appears in one of the most ridiculously unconvincing staged moments in the film involving a nail-filer.