Through the Fire (1988).
“You don’t really believe this voodoo bullshit, do you?”
Directed by Gary Marcum
Written by Gary Marcum and Brad Potter
Starring Tamara Hext, Tom Campitelli, and Randy Strickland
The Stage.
Five weeks after her sister has gone missing, Sandra Curtis comes to town to find her. She enlists the help of a local police officer with nothing better to do named Nick and together, they stumble onto a group of satanic losers who have summoned a demon named Moloch and this may be connected to Sandra’s sister. This Southwestern film was released on VHS as The Gates of Hell Part II.
The Review.
My thoughts exactly.
Through the Fire is Gary Marcum’s only director credit, and it’s easy to see why - after this pile of trash, no one else would give him another shot. Everything about this movie is subpar, so let’s start with the direction. Shots are not composed in interesting ways. From the very first frame, you can tell that this film is going to be a hack job, as a car rolls into frame with the bottom of the tires cut off in a wide shot. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there. Most of the film is framed on very close up shots, done intentionally - not to put you in the action, but to hide the fact that it was probably filmed on a budget of couch cushion change. There’s one shot in particular of two guys ‘rock climbing’ that was probably done in someone’s backyard. As such, the film never feels like it’s giving you room to breathe and doesn’t allow for much of a sense of space. The action is erratically edited and doesn’t make any sense. One scene that features a home invasion is so clumsily edited that during a shotgun blast near the end of it, you’ll never know who fired the shot. There are also a bunch of sloppy POV shots when the ‘monster’ is chasing someone but it looks more like the view of a remote control car.
The actors aren’t given much to work with here in terms of material, and as bad as the words on the page are, they’re even worse when these goofballs are delivering the dialogue out loud. In one scene, Nick nearly has his hand pulled into a garbage disposal. After freeing his hand, he looks at his palm and in complete seriousness, says, “I thought I was going to lose you.” Nick is supposed to be playing this playboy tough guy cop who spouts “I am very badass” lines like, “I read my magazines back to front, but I got more of a loser vibe from him, especially when you watch him stick his finger into a mug of hot coffee and is seemingly surprised that he burns himself or when you see an old plate of dried up mac & cheese sitting on a dry dish rack in the background of his ratty apartment. He gets wrapped up into this mess after he has to escort Sandra home because she’s drunk and getting rowdy at a local watering hole. She calls him the next day and asks him to look for her sister, so he just takes a week off from work and does it. There’s no struggle, no real questions. Late in the film, he adds ‘hijacks an old woman’s car and leaves her on the side of the road’ to the list of reasons why this character sucks. He’s also running with a shotgun in one scene and he almost drops it and then starts swinging it around like he’s trying to wrangle an out of control grocery bag and they just kept the take in the film. This tells us either the editor had nothing else to use or they really wanted us to think of Nick as a complete and utter doofus. Speaking of that running scene, it’s absurdly edited, cutting between Nick and Sandra running and oddly framed shots of the outside of a building.
Your hero, ladies and gentlemen.
Sandra is played by the absolutely stunning Tamara Hext, whose claim to fame was being the 4th runner up in the 1985 Miss Texas pageant. Unfortunately, she’s not an actor, and her reactions to Nick seem more geared towards the intro of a TGIF show than someone whose sister is probably dead. Her two best character traits are that she bugs everyone non-stop and also has clearly seen Die Hard. The villains are a handful of interchangeable dorks who you won’t be able to tell apart aside from one who wears a pocket protector filled with pens and has taped up glasses. They summoned a demon by using a pentagram ouija board. We can only speculate on what they wanted to do that for because a medium named PJ that we’ll instead call ‘exposition dump lady’ tells us that people let the devil in for personal gain like bass boats, stock tips, and sex, the three things every evil mastermind wants. They’re extremely incompetent, the five are bested by Nick, Sandra, and exposition dump lady while they’re sleeping. There’s also a woman in their group and maybe I just dozed off during this part but I never saw her get her comeuppance because she just sort of disappears after the home invasion scene.
Now this is technically a thriller/monster movie, so you probably want to know how the action, gore and monster effects are. Well, not good. As the film was limping toward its inevitable conclusion, I saw a showdown coming inside an abandoned building, and I was pretty excited. “This must be the reason Vinegar Syndrome chose this film”, I thought. Turns out they probably chose this film because it was cheap. The showdown pits the evil goons against a mysterious team we’re introduced to about an hour into the film that “combats evil”, whatever that means. I didn’t really care, but they had guns and one had an eyepatch, so I was on board. Once they get into the building, everyone that dies is killed offscreen. You see a character, it cuts to a wall and you hear a ‘bang’, and then it’s just onto the next scene. One of the bad guys dies and you don’t even know who it was, it just shows their back and three bullet holes in it. I mean, embarrassingly bad. Nearly the entire twenty minute scene feels like no one worked the same day and everyone just shot their scenes separately.
As for the gore, there isn’t much and you don’t see the monster until the last five minutes. Moloch ends up inhabiting the body of what looks like Napoleon Dynamite’s brother Kip and then jumps to the body of one of the Monster Hunters and we get to see an okay transformation scene but it’s cut to hell so that you don’t actually see any of it happening. Other than that there’s really nothing to see here.
The End.
The Losers Club.
Through the Fire is another stinker scraped from the bottom of the 1980’s barrel. It’s bad all around and I cannot find one thing about it that I can recommend. Vinegar Syndrome put way more effort into this release than was probably warranted. The slipcover was the best thing about this Blu-ray. There is a directors commentary that I have not yet listened to but kind of want to, just to hear some of the absurdity explained.
