User Reviews

"Days of Fury" gives us 90 minutes of tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, locust swarms, fires, floods, plane crashes, racing accidents, point-blank assassinations, riots and baby seal clubbings. Not the film to watch when you need something to pick you up, that's for sure. Some of it is shocking or morbidly fascinating, but much of it is exploitative or just plain boring. The footage was obviously collected from a lot of different sources, and it is often blurry or jerky. Vincent Price provides the portentous narration, and also a few ironic comments that could be fun in a fictional horror film but can be hard to take when they are referring to real events. (*1/2)

Days of Fury is yet another redundant documentary style 'Mondo' film; along the same lines as Mondo Cane and Faces of Death. This one, however, does have its own little plus point; in the form of the great Vincent Price, who for some reason decided to do the narration. I have no idea why such a great actor would involve himself in something like this...but even so, his presence (while mostly a vocal presence) is my only reason for seeing the film, and the film's only big plus point. To be honest, I could happily spend ninety minutes listening to Vincent Price talk about the price of fish through the ages, and there are worse subjects to hear him speak about than death and destruction. This film focuses on destruction, mainly, both natural and man made and we see things like the oil industry, hunting, earthquakes, famine, volcanoes, buildings falling down etc.

It's not exactly pleasant, but at least parts of it are interesting. The footage is clearly lifted from a range of different sources and the quality varies several times throughout the film; which makes it feel very low rent indeed. This sort of stuff is generally rated on how good its subject materials are; and actually here they're not bad. It all seems real (unlike, say, Faces of Death) which is to its credit and parts of it such as a scene in which a bridge sways and eventually falls down are well worth seeing. Vincent Price does appear in person at times too; with various cuts of him explaining the footage in person featuring. It is kind of a shame that he was involved in something like this; but to be honest I'd hate to have seen this film without his voice in it. The film appears to condemn most of man's actions and simply portray horror caused by nature; but unfortunately there's never really any point made. The genre is entitled 'Mondo' (meaning 'World') for a reason; that being that it shows events happening in the world, although without any focus...it does make me as the viewer question why I'm watching.

I'm not really a big fan of the mondo movie. The genre flourished after the success of Franco Prosperi's MONDO CANE in 1962, as documentary after documentary was released featuring real-life future of destruction, both in the human world and in nature. Death and sex were the main ingredients of these sleazy efforts that usually amount to little more than attempts to gross-out the viewer, with FACES OF DEATH being the nadir of the cycle. Narrative and structure are usually ignored in favour of trying to get the viewer to offload his lunch.

DAYS OF FURY is a little different: firstly as it's Dutch, and secondly as it does attempt to have some semblance of a structure. Unfortunately, that structure is barely existent and virtually falls apart as the film progresses. It's no more than excuse to have scenes of natural disasters interspersed with some clips of human disasters and frailty. There are volcanoes exploding, chicks and seals being destroyed by mankind, political assassinations and a chilling segment of a bridge caught in a hurricane. Luckily there isn't too much stomach-churning footage, although the seal clubbing moment is deeply unpleasant. Footage of human death is in fairly short supply here.

The great news is that an ageing Vincent Price has been drafted in as narrator, and his presence alone doubles the entertainment on offer. Price is the perfect kind of host for this kind of faux-dramatic documentary and his voice adds a lot to the experience. Sadly, though, at the end of the day there still isn't much to be had from this blatant attempt at money-making, which offers nothing you haven't seen before.

DAYS OF FURY was another of the countless obscurities picked up for a quick video release in the UK in the early days of home video. It's a FACES OF DEATH-type production full of newsreel footage of seal culls, motorcycle crashes, burning buildings, earthquakes and so on, hosted by Vincent Price! Yes, the same Vincent Price who appeared in all those classic chillers. I can only assume he was short of pocket money back in 1980. This was released in Britain by the same company who put the Christopher Plummer-helmed freakshow BEING DIFFERENT on the shelves, which is probably very telling. There's some impressive footage here as well as the usual gratuitous shock clips (lovers of cute baby seal cubs should look away NOW!), but it's little more than exploitation dressed up as education. Now, back to Mr Price. Don't remember him this way...check out THEATRE OF BLOOD instead, in which the great man effortlessly spoofs himself whilst remaining quite terrifying.

Narrated by immortal Vincent Price "Days of Fury" is a pretty tame and shoddy shockumentary about various natural disasters.It shows often spectacular footage of volcanic eruptions,earthquakes,airplane crashes,car crashes,floods in Bangladesh,snow avalanches,tsunamis,tornadoes,fires,bridge collapses and super tank catastrophes.The most disturbing bit is definitely senseless animal butchery including baby seal clubbing.As a fan of volcanoes I enjoyed the footage of erupting volcanoes Etna and Heimaey on Iceland.Some conspiracy theories for example future global ice age are laughable at best,but it's nice to see and hear Vincent Price.A generous 7 volcanoes out of 10.