Producer Irwin Allen kept his once-Towering cinematic credibility in flames with Fire, a virtual remake of his previous year’s telepic Flood — just with another basic concept from your high school chemistry class (or a then-rather popular 1970s R&B-funk band).
The real-life town of Silverton, Oregon, comes under siege from a massive blaze sparked by the cigarette butt carelessly discarded by a greasy convict (Neville Brand, Psychic Killer) doing chain-gang cleanup work in the forest. In the line of fire — literally! — are such soaped-up characters as a widowed lodge owner (Vera Miles, The Spirit Is Willing), the well-below-her-league old man who has tried to get into her pants for decades (Ernest Borgnine, The Poseidon Adventure), and a teacher (Donna Mills, who clenched a bigger role two years later in Hanging by a Thread, another Allen tele-epic) on a field trip with her young charges.
And speaking of Hanging by a Thread, Patty Duke again assumes the role of an unhappy wife, here married — for the moment, at least — to a fellow doctor (Alex Cord, Chosen Survivors). Perhaps their love will be, um, reignited? Dur.
An Allen touchstone, the well-stocked cast is fun to watch, including Erik Estrada (Airport 1975) as a prisoner who uses the smoke as convenient cover for an escape. Director Earl Bellamy (Walking Tall Part II) puts Estrada front-and-center as much as he can, assumedly realizing the soon-to-be-CHiPs star’s chiseled good looks are Fire’s most special of effects. It’s certainly not the lazy stock footage of terrified townspeople — some in horn-rimmed glasses, to show just how mismatched the material is. —Rod Lott