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Flood! was the first television-sized dis­as­ter flick for Irwin Allen but it cer­tainly wasn’t the last.  In fact, it was pro­duced back-to-back with Fire!, another made-for-t.v. effort uti­liz­ing the same direc­tor (Earl Bellamy) and some sim­i­lar Oregon set­tings.  As you might expect from these ori­gins, the sec­ond film has a def­i­nite ‘more of the same’ feel­ing but the results are slightly bet­ter than its predecessor.

As with Flood!, nature once again rebels against mankind for its care­less­ness.  This time, a for­est fire is sparked by Larry Durant (Neville Brand), a schem­ing work-detail pris­oner aim­ing to cre­ate a calamity that will allow him to escape.  Unfortunately, he’s way too suc­cess­ful and soon a nearby town is in dan­ger.  Other characters/potential flame-fodder include nice-guy lum­ber mill owner Sam (Ernest Borgnine), lodge owner Martha (Vera Miles) — who Sam is in love with — and a pair of mar­ried doc­tors on the verge of divorce, Alex (Alex Cord) and Peggy (Patty Duke).  Additional sub­plots include a teacher (Donna Mills) who loses a kid in the blaze dur­ing a field trip and a wrongly-convicted pris­oner (Erik Estrada) who wants to escape.

Fire! has a lot of the same prob­lems as Flood!: the bud­getary corner-cutting inher­ent to a t.v. project lim­its the amount of excite­ment and the script shame­lessly pads itself with gra­tu­itous soap-opera melo­drama and stock char­ac­ter­i­za­tions.  Some the lat­ter ele­ment can be fun — the early, bitchy scenes between Cord and Duke are campy enough to prompt a few chuck­les — but it quickly sets in that all the jab­ber­ing between these card­board char­ac­ters is a dis­trac­tion from the fact that there wasn’t enough money in the bud­get for any epic-scale destruc­tive setpieces.

It’s also annoy­ing that sev­eral plot threads in Fire! are left hang­ing due to the lim­i­ta­tions of its t.v. movie time slot: for instance, the ulti­mate fate of Estrada’s pris­oner char­ac­ter is never resolved despite get­ting a lot of screen time.  There’s also a ridicu­lous dénoue­ment to the Borgnine/Miles roman­tic sub­plot: with­out get­ting into spoil­ers, it’s a mis­guided attempt at melo­drama that tries to tug sev­eral dif­fer­ent heart­strings in the space of a minute and it ends the film on a note of unin­ten­tional hilarity.

On the upside, Fire! ben­e­fits from a lit­tle more car­nage than its pre­de­ces­sor.  It’s cheaper to shoot fire stunts than try to sim­u­late a flood so there are peri­odic scenes of peo­ple on fire run­ning around and scream­ing that will keep the viewer awake (these moments con­jure up fond mem­o­ries of the “Irwin Allen Show” sketch from SCTV).  Earl Bellamy’s direc­tion fares bet­ter this time as there is more action to chore­o­graph.  Finally, and most impor­tantly, Fire! thor­oughly ben­e­fits from the pres­ence of Ernest Borgnine.  He deliv­ers a pro­fes­sional per­for­mance, never con­de­scend­ing to the limp mate­r­ial and always giv­ing the pro­ceed­ings his all.

That said, Fire! is ulti­mately minor stuff on the dis­as­ter movie scale: bet­ter (and shorter) than, say, When Time Ran Out but nowhere near as enter­tain­ing as its obvi­ous model, The Towering Inferno.  It’s fairly pain­less when com­pared to Flood! and the Irwin Allen com­pletists should find it mod­er­ately amus­ing — just don’t expect too much.