A Fire in the Sky

As a kid, I saw two movies in the late 70's about celestial bodies heading towards earth, A Fire In the Sky and Meteor. This movie was quite different from Meteor in premise alone. This was not about a collective effort to avert a disaster; it was about how to collectively get the hell out of town. Richard Crenna played Jason Voight, an astronomer who somehow knew that this desert metropolis was doomed the split second after the words were uttered from the Presidents mouth, as he explained to a group of scientist that the comet was probably heading for earth. Although this movie to me was extremely cheesy, over acted and sometime under acted, and you got to see down town Phoenix high-rises crumble one by one, I liked it. I would have to say that it is one of my GUILTY PLEASURES

Hilarious attempt at a small-screen version of a big-screen disaster film, complete with ersatz astronomy, the impassioned pleas of the ignored and scoffed-at scientist, and mandatory death and scale-model destruction scenes. The hysterical nurse who rushes from the subterranean shelter only to be ripped from life by the wake of the comet impact scene is a definite must.

Look for the definitive sequence of astronomical photographic plates that feature a parade 'o planets with the coment growing ominously bigger and closer in each shot.

Crenna's ending smokin'-peyote-with-the-Pima-Indians as we watch the comet streak toward its mark is also "to die for."

Scale modelers, arise against abuse by bad made-for-TV movies! Let's give it three meteors out of ten.

Spawned from the disaster move craze of the 70's, with all the production and artistic values one would expect from a network dramatic production. So horrible I can never take my eyes off the screen.

Having grown up in Phoenix, the destruction scenes -- including a hilarious shot of the Hyatt rotating restaurant spinning off like a Frisbee -- are my particular favorite.

This is perhaps my all-time favorite trash-TV movie. I have a theory that all of us secretly cherish at least one utterly indefensible object of art or entertainment - something we know is simply awful, but which we love nonetheless. Maybe it's pro wrestling, maybe it's "The Dukes of Hazzard." For me, it's this TV movie.

I'm something of an amateur astronomy buff, so that may explain part of my attraction to this movie. However, virtually every moment, every plot device, every line of dialogue, every scene and every revelation of character in "A Fire in the Sky" is so stultifyingly formulaic that you wonder if the people who wrote it even graduated from grade school. It's no exaggeration to say that, twenty minutes into the movie, you can accurately predict the final outcomes of each of the several subplots. The characters are not the least bit real; they are complete and absolutely transparent stereotypes. And adding an element of incongruity to the movie is the fact that the actors attack their roles with surprising vigor. Richard Crenna and Elizabeth Ashley, in particular, seem to think they're in "King Lear," not this hokey, connect-the-dots, pre-fab drama.

The result is a production that is not in on its own joke. It doesn't seem to know how bad it really is. It's a professional product that seems to have been offered seriously. And yet it's awful. The result is that it achieves a kind of exquisite stupidity. We're not laughing with it; we're laughing at it. And as such, for me, at least, it transcends its own badness and becomes highly entertaining.

What can I say? There's no good reason anyone should like something this dumb. And yet I do.

Classic schlock TV movie about a meteor heading for Phoenix. If you enjoy campy '70's disaster movies you will like this one. When it hits, the city is pretty much destroyed. There are some great scenes of people running and screaming as buildings fall on them, just what you'd want from a disaster film. Watch for a very young Michael Biehn.