A unique combination of detective story, demonic horror, and action movie (in that order), Through the Fire (1988) is a Texas-set near-masterpiece of tension and thrills.
Some of your universe's critics fail to appreciate one-time director Gary Marcum's magnum opus. For example, reviewer poolandrews writes bluntly, "Through the Fire is a throughly wretched piece of film-making, it has no redeeming features whatsoever & is total crap from start to finish." Reviewer kannibalcorpsegrinder writes eloquently, "This here was just utterly pitiful and plain bad." And reviewer BA_Harrison writes loquaciously, "Through the Fire is disappointing on almost every level, with a sloppy script, poor direction, choppy editing and awful acting resulting in a meandering and totally baffling experience."
Read on for an accurate appreciation of Through the Fire...
A woman wearing red pulls her car off the road. “This is just great,” she says dejectedly as she decides to replace a flat tire. After some trouble with the lug nuts, she sees a car pull up behind her. Then she screams.
After this tense opening, we are introduced to Sandra, the sister of the woman who disappeared, as she drinks in a country bar. When she drunkenly tosses peanuts at the bartender, he calls the police and a young officer escorts her to his police car.
“All I want is a drink,” Sandra says.
“No problem,” the officer, Nick Berkley, says cleverly, “I keep a bottle in my car. For emergencies.” He then proceeds to ogle her as she passes out on the passenger seat.
The film cuts to a group of men sitting around an elaborate Satanic spirit board as lightning flashes outside. One of the men says ominously (and helpfully for the audience), “We’ve always been able to control these things before. But now, I don’t know why we conjured in the first place. I mean, how do we know these Destroyers really exist?”
Suddenly, a bell rings and the planchette flies around the spirit board.
The spirit board spells out EX 22-20, and then a Bible falls onto the table and (also helpfully) opens to the appropriate page. One of the men reads, “Exodus, Chapter 22, Verse 20: He that sacrificeth unto any god save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed.” He adds sarcastically, “Great.”
Meanwhile, a woman supervising a sleepover with two young boys investigates a noise in her garage, but she is murdered offscreen. Blood drips onto the garage floor.
The next day, Sandra wakes up with a hangover. Her first impulse is to call Officer Nick Berkley, who is in bed with a nude woman. Sandra thanks him over the phone, then tells him she has a problem with which she needs help. “Okay,” he says, “I’ll meet you downtown, at the bar. Noon-thirty?”
At approximately noon-thirty, Sandra meets Officer Berkeley in the country bar. She tells him her sister disappeared and she wants to hire him to find her because the police (presumably including Officer Berkley) haven’t done anything. She tells him, as dramatic music kicks in, “I keep having this horrible dream. Marilyn and I are walking on the edge of this high cliff. And the edge slopes away, then it drops 1,000 feet straight down. And Marilyn slips. She starts to slide. I reach out to her but it’s too late. And we both knew she’s already dead. There’s nothing we could do about it. The look in her eyes, it says everything we don’t have time to say. And then she’s gone.”
Elsewhere, another woman is murdered offscreen, this one while she is on the phone with an overweight police officer.
Sandra and Officer Berkley’s investigation begins as they explore a room that is either her sister’s home or her place of business. As they go through the woman’s belongings, a delivery person drops off a box with Marilyn’s necklace, which was being cleaned and repaired. Sandra says her sister always wore the necklace, but she notices for the first time some writing on the circular amulet. “It looks like Russian or Hebrew or something,” the detective says.
After a man enters the room and tells Sandra to tell Marilyn that Randy is looking for her, Officer Berkley says, “Well, I guess I’m about ready to pack it in for today.” Then he comforts Sandra in the most effective manner possible. “She’s missing. Lots of people are missing.”
Elsewhere, two young men climb a cliff above a lake. When the first man reaches the top, he sees a horrific sight: a burned arm frozen in a reaching position (as if it has been Through the Fire).
The first man runs away while the second man is still climbing the cliff; the second man, either through some random accident or some unseen force, falls off the cliff and dies, his body hanging beside the rocks.
The next day, as Sandra and Officer Berkley investigate more, they realize the disappearance of the young men at the cliff occurred very close to where Sandra’s sister disappeared. They drive out and park at the bottom of the cliff. Sandra, prominently holding a can of Dr. Pepper, asks, “How are we supposed to get up there?”
“Probably supposed to climb,” Officer Berkley says. “But I vote we take the trail. It’s a lot farther but a lot less straight up.”
In a quick cut, the two are at the top of the cliff. They find a pentagram marked on the rocks (though inexplicably the filmmakers do not show the pentagram to the audience). Sandra and Officer Berkley go to the university library for a classic montage of looking through books. Then Officer Berkley asks a professor to translate the Hebrew inscription on Marilyn’s locket. “This is very bizarre,” the female professor tells the detective. “Well, you’re familiar with the Bible? The Old Testament?”
“Uh, well...”
“I realize it’s pretty hard to follow. This here refers to Yahweh. Yahweh is God’s name, I mean his proper name. You see, it was so holy, you couldn’t say it aloud. He was referred to as the Lord, or God, or God of Abraham. This right here refers to Moloch. When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, the people of the lands they travelled through worshipped many gods. But one, Moloch, was the most evil. He demanded that his followers perform vile and brutal sacrifices. Human sacrifices. Men, women, and children were mutilated and then burned. They were passed through the fire for Moloch.” She adds, “The person who wore this medallion was a Destroyer.” Destroyers were charged by God to destroy the evil people who sacrificed humans to Moloch. The professor believes Sandra’s sister was a Destroyer.
Helpfully, the filmmakers cut to a scene with the evil cabal who summoned the Destroyer. (However, it is soon revealed that they conjured an anti-Destroyer to protect them from Sandra, the Destroyer.) Their oracle/fortune teller tells them they have a chance if they find the medallion. “You do have some powers,” she tells the group ominously. “Use them.”
In a nice, unexpected sequence, Officer Berkley is suddenly attacked by supernatural means when he opens a door. Sandra is also attacked — small tadpole-like entities suggestively pull open her shirt to expose her bra.
“It felt like my bones were on fire,” comments Officer Berkley when the supernatural forces disappear.
The professor, who is helping to explain what is going on, says, “Someone is after you, Sandra. Someone is after you for that medallion. And now they know where you are.”
The three protagonists decide to spend the night at Sandra’s house. The professor says, “I would like to get some things from home.”
“Yeah,” quips Sandra, “like some hand grenades.”
When they get ready to drive to the professor’s house to get her things, Sandra says she would like to stay home and read the professor’s book. Officer Berkley, in a statement that prefigures the “meta” horror films that would dominate the box office in the next decade, says, “Oh no you don’t. You’ve obviously never seen any scary movies. The first rule of survival — never separate.”
He backs down, however, when Sandra says she’ll be safe and she has a gun. He and the professor leave Sandra in the house, where she puts on a jazz record and then drops a single ice cube into her wine glass. Then she attempts to feed her cat Filmore, but the cat is nowhere to be found. She looks through the house for the cat, then finds it, shockingly, in the freezer — perhaps supernaturally, its body was not in the freezer when she got the ice cube minutes earlier!
The others arrive at the same time as Sandra discovers the body. “There’s a cat in your freezer,” Officer Berkley says with great confusion.
Then a hand comes out of the garbage disposal to grab Officer Berkley’s arm.
At night, the members of the cabal break into Sandra’s house and hold Sandra, Officer Berkley, and the professor at knifepoint, asking where the medallion is. Fortunately, Officer Berkley shoots at one of the men and they all run away, but the professor is hit by another gunshot. Sandra holds her in the hallway as the professor dies.
Back at the cabal’s headquarters (i.e., someone’s garage), the female oracle removes bullets from one of the men’s backsides. “Next time, we’ll be ready,” he says. “And next time we’ll have it under control.”
Sandra and Officer Berkley go to his apartment to escape the supernatural threat. They are followed by Randy, someone who seems to know more about the situation as the late professor. “I promise there will be retribution,” he says.
Officer Berkley replies, “An eye for an eye?”
“Precisely. That was her business, Marilyn’s and mine. You see, we deal in a separate reality. I don’t expect you to understand it but you must realize that what we do is essential. Evil is our reality. It’s our job to combat it.”
Randy gets a phone call at the officer’s house telling him that one of the cabal members has decided to betray the group for a plane ticket to Rio. Randy and his group of Destroyers (or possibly Anti-Destroyers) get ready to move in on the cabal, forbidding Sandra and Officer Berkley to join them, but the officer has bugged his own phone so he knows where the attack on the cabal will take place. They get ready by putting on bulletproof vests and loading various guns, and also digging up a box with two hand grenades. Then, in a humorous scene, Officer Berkley commandeers an old lady’s car, but not before she pulls a gun on him thinking she is being carjacked.
In the climactic action sequence, the cabal enters an office building searching for the Destroyer and/or the medallion. Randy’s group follows them and begins shooting at them, while Sandra and Officer Berkley join in with their shotguns and grenades. Walking through a smoky corridor, Sandra hears her sister Marilyn’s voice, so she follows it through a doorway. However, it is not Marilyn but a zombie, possibly with Marilyn’s consciousness inside it. In any case, Sandra and Officer Berkley shoot it.
Sandra and Officer Berkley reach the cabal on the top floor of the office building, where Officer Berkley is shot and Sandra is chased by either the same zombie, a different zombie, or one of the cabal members. When Sandra is trapped against a wall, arms reach through the wall, but she manages to drop an armed grenade through the arm-hole and stop the creature attacking her. Then she runs from another cabal member who transforms into a demon. Resourcefully, Sandra ties a firehose around her waist and jumps out the window while exploding another grenade in the room with the demon.
On the way down the stairwell, Sandra runs into Officer Berkley. She holds him at gunpoint because she saw him die, but he reveals he was wearing a bulletproof vest. She tells him to recite the Lord’s Prayer, which he attempts to do, unsuccessfully but charmingly, so she runs down the stairs with him, convinced he has a bad memory but is not a demon. The film cuts to the credits as the two argue about the wording of the Lord’s Prayer.
The End
Through the Fire begins as a mystery, as Sandra hires Officer Berkley to find her missing sister. The film seamlessly transitions to a supernatural horror film showing a cabal of ordinary men summoning a demon in order to make a sacrifice to Moloch in order to become rich. It then seamlessly transitions again to an action movie in which the heroes lay siege to an office building. All three elements work tremendously well, as the thrills keep coming, some in the daytime but most at night, when it is somewhat difficult to see what is transpiring (a strategy that always keeps the viewer guessing).
If there could possibly be any criticism of the film, it would be that there is simply so much inventiveness with which to keep up. The presence of demons, Destroyers, and Anti-Destroyers sets up a complex mythology that one film cannot possibly explore fully. An undiscerning audience might complain that it would be nice to see and/or understand the Destroyers and/or Anti-Destroyers, but the true genre aficionado knows that explaining too much results in bland entertainment. The Destroyers and Anti-Destroyers summoned in our minds are more entertaining and mythic than cinematic special effects are able to deliver. Failing to explain such things (as we have seen time and again here at Senseless Cinema) is the true path to a cinematic masterpiece.