Serpiente de fuego (La hija del sol)

Have you ever wondered about those angels spoken of in the Bible of fire and sword? Well science fiction has uncovered an explanation for them. Turns out in Fire Serpent they are living creatures unlike our carbon based life form that live in solar flares. Every now and then they get themselves loose and wreak all kinds of havoc. Check in the Bible Leviticus Chapter Ten and you can read what one of these things did to the sons of Aaron.

Some wacko agent from Homeland Security played by Voyager's Robert Beltran's who's a little far gone on religion has this brilliant idea to use one of these things as a method of meting out some of us his own divine retribution. Nothing like pretending you're the Deity when the power gets thrust upon you. It's up to Buffy the Vampire Slayer veteran Nicholas Brendon and Emergency's Randolph Mantooth to stop the creature and he who seeks to use it.

It's kind of sad to see what some players come down to, but a paycheck is a paycheck. The science in the science fiction leaves a lot to be desired and if this thing could really be true and these creatures have visited us before, the earth would have been left a burning cinder several millenia ago.

This was absolutely awful but unfortunately I've seen worse. At least the production value is good (It doesn't look like someone shooting their first film with a camcorder). The basic story had possibilities but it went nowhere. It was just cheesy and a waste of time but considering that William Shatner wrote and produced this what do you expect but cheese. The major test of this is that I walked out of the room when it was playing and didn't care if I missed any of it. The only good thing about this was seeing Randolph Mantooth in something other than a soap but even he couldn't save this turkey. All I've seen Robert Beltran and Nicholas Brendon in since their series have ended has been really bad TV or straight to video movies. I should have known this would be bad but I keep hoping for something decent.

A couple of campers, remembering Smokey the Bear's admonition that "only you can prevent forest fires" dutifully attempt to put out their campfire with water, only to be possessed/roasted by some angry fire entity (which occasionally growls or roars) that doesn't like water much. From there it torches or possesses anybody it can find, but it's out in the wilderness, so there aren't too many victims available. It's a smart fire creature, though, so it plots and executes a plan to...uhh, do something nasty, apparently.

Guess what? A government conspiracy, led by a lunatic who spouts off out-of-context biblical scriptures about fires, is trying to use the thing to wipe out people he doesn't like. Can you say "two-cliches-for-the-price-of-one?" Can you further believe this nut job with his "burning desire" is named (ready?) Cooke? Egad. His able assistant, unaware of his intentions, helps a firefighter find a way to extinguish the menace, with the predictable results as to who's going to end up french-fried and who survives. Theories about the invader abound: not only is it accused of apocalyptic tendencies, but apparently it came from solar flares. Because of these disjointed and impossible to reconcile backgrounds, plot holes proliferate faster than the charred bodies of victims. For example, why didn't these pyrotechnic wraiths sizzle the whole planet long ago?

The acting actually rises above the script and breathes some life into the characters' back stories and motivations. Special effects get a split-decision: some are impressive and interesting, others are just fake looking and cheap. Overall: watchable. However, nobody involved need write an Oscar acceptance speech.

Was the cast on quaaludes? The acting is so leaden you wonder if they were on something. No facial expressions, no reactions, no emotion. Just "actors" standing woodenly while reading slowly off cue cards. So slowly. Seriously detracts from the otherwise dreadful special effects and non existent plot.

Three stars for the Buffy alumni guy attempting to act and the surprisingly accurate depiction of just how expendable journalists are. Two die, no one even pretends to care. Three stars.

Fire Serpent is a pretty run of the mill sci-fi channel movie of the week, which is strange considering how the one who 'created' the fire serpent concept, William Shatner, probably comes up with more wacky ideas than this. There's actually some messed-up creature potential with a thing like a 'fire serpent', as it's basically a gigantic fire-ball that spouts out of the sun, crashes to Earth, and sustains itself on human life and fossil fuels. But not much else is really explored, or exploited, aside from so-typical-it's-meh character schemes and a fairly complex level of figuring out how it is that the fire serpent actually goes about its business or how it can be stomped out. It's too run of the mill to get into any real interesting ground, but when compared to the last sci-fi channel movie featuring a Buffy alumni, Gryphon, Fire Serpent doesn't go into the depths of wretchedly hellish tripe all around.

This time we just get Nicholas Brendon as the 'young, teach-me-everything-from-a-mentor' young fireman, who meets Dutch Fallon (Randolph Mantooth, who's name is probably much cooler than anything else in the movie), a man who's been tracking the fire serpent for forty years, ever since it destroyed his girlfriend (which we see in a first inexplicable flashback at the start, then a second one where it's not really from his point of view as seen). Dutch, despite being an arsonist, is under the eye of an old rival, played by Rober Beltran, who also happens to be a big religious freak (some of this dialog is actually really funny, unintentionally of course). It all leads up to a showdown at a fossil-fuel station, where finally the cheesy sci-fi visual effects and limited action get their dues. Throughout we're treated to pretty half-note (not even quite one-note) characters, who occasionally talk in sound bytes from what might have been Shatner's pitch to the networks.

The lack of logic at times doesn't kill one's soul, but there's also not much to gorge on if you're looking for heavy action or twisted moments of delirious flights of sci-fi fancy; closest things I saw were when the serpent cut a woman in half (through a human host), and an amazingly entertaining- for all the wrong reasons- scene where a henchman tosses a grenade in Jake's car, leading to a very odd scene with the henchman just standing a while holding a targeting gun and not doing anything until a policeman and the fire serpent do their own things in the scene. Yet a lot of the time I just sat waiting for stuff to happen that built up to nothing very special, and a climax that didn't have me yelling or cursing at the screen but seemed still annoying in just going bigger and crazier (and not fun crazy) until that last warped moment of an open-book ending. Fire Serpent 2 perhaps? I'd really hope not, as there wasn't enough to really sustain the first one, except over-cooked plot contrivances (or under-cooked depending on point of view), cardboard acting (even when one is shot and near-death), and a fairly limited creature by way of the visual effects (not like Gryphon, though that's like saying it's the clap instead of AIDS).