Le souffle de la Terre

FIRE FROM BELOW is a rubbishy disaster movie with a rubbishy story and some very bad script writing. Unsurprisingly, it was directed by Jim Wynorski, a man not known for the quality of his productions, although Andrew Stevens (the actor from '70s fare such as THE FURY) also plays a big part as producer and co-director and has a cameo as a TV journalist to boot.

The film sees a band of miners accidentally hitting a vein of liquid fire which has the ability to react with the air and cause some truly explosive disasters. Cue various scientists as they end up racing around the country and trying to figure out a way to stop the disaster from escalating. Inevitably there's a ruthless businessman trying to cover it all up. There are a couple of good CGI scenes here of the fire snaking through the air before attacking its victims, with the speedboat chase being my favourite moment, but for the most part this is a bore.

Inevitably some extraneous characters find themselves trapped underground and have to be rescued. Kevin Sorbo shows up as the hero and looks tired and stressed in equal measure. Maeghan Albach plays his girlfriend but the two stars share zero chemistry and she's a rubbish actress to boot. Alex Meneses, who is brought in for glamour value, is much better and should have had a more prominent role. B-movie actor Alex Cord shows up as a military character. That is all.

Well - the 2.7 rating is HIGH.

REAL nice special effects with the fire, someone clearly imported some computer graphics effects processing to the project, but short of that?

You will want to skip this one, it's not even so bad it's good.

I didn't recognize any of the actors, but the shaky camera on opening scene was a hint to me this is amateur hour.

I struggle to figure out who would make a movie like this.

It's worse than bad.

Worth watching for Alex Meneses. She shines in a somewhat intriguing cast. Familiar faces Burton Gilliam and James Hampton have bit parts, but both make quick exits. Sorbo being the main star power, is a bit too laid back here. He was about 50 years old when this was filmed. Meneses was 44, and would have been better cast playing opposite Sorbo, than than the much younger Maeghan Albach who was just 34 years old. Sadly, Albach died of complications from alcohol use in 2019, ten years after filming Fire From Below. The idea for the story isn't without potential. It's just not very well done, and the computer generated graphics of the fire chasing them are frankly just very silly. The movie was shot in different locations, and that always irks me in movies when its so noticeable. Imo it should have all been shot in Texas, and the computer generated crap cut out. So to sum up, I like Sorbo, but his performance here was a bit disappointing. Would have liked to seen more of Meneses. The movie doesn't ever really connect and draw in the viewer. We did have fun watching it though and looking up members of the cast.

I was dubious of whether it would work out due to it being SyFy and that it was directed by Jim Wynorski. However I was very intrigued by its idea, and thought to myself if done in the right way Fire From Below could be halfway decent. Unfortunately while the idea was neat, the film's ineptness in almost every single department means that Fire From Below is a rather lukewarm experience rather than a flaming hot one. Kevin Sorbo does have likability and an easygoing charisma which you can see in this film. Glenn Morshower also manages to ooze authority, though his role is one that we've seen so many times. On the negative side, Sorbo's performance is the only thing about Fire From Below that works. None of the rest of the cast come close to matching him, ranging to bad to non-existent acting skills. In all fairness though, their characters, if we forget for a second that they are walking clichés, are nowhere near developed or likable enough to really connect to the viewer, and their dialogue will make your teeth grind together at the sheer banality of it all. The special effects look half-finished and colourless, managing to look cheap against everything else that's going on, while the editing is very choppy especially in the action sequences. I'd say the worst asset is the story, here logic and science gets thrown out of the window(not uncommon actually with SyFy), leaving repetitive underground scenes, lamely choreographed action sequences that look as though they were actually improvised on the spot, unintentionally hilarious killings(teens exploding while taking a leak, really) and the needless and stupid inclusion of having news on and I think over-explaining things that we have seen before that are only there to pad out the running time. In the end the running time actually feels too long for the thinness of the story structure here as well. All in all, had potential but chose to ignore it. 3/10 Bethany Cox

I have seen a great deal of movies in my day. This is the worst one. The train wreck of it all kept me watching until the end and I was upset with myself for it. You would think that something so unwatchable would somehow become a cult classic. This won't. The acting quality is so pathetic that you just end up feeling sorry for the cast. I would venture a guess that most of them have other full-time jobs. I would recommend this movie to anyone who feels the need to calibrate the audio/visual sensors in their brain to default settings by watching something so ridiculous that it forces a master reset. I watched Kalifornia directly after this film and it was the best movie I had ever seen in my life.