Well, they can’t all be good.

While I’m certain that this isn’t the first or the last time an Impulse Buy Theater review goes negative, it’s nice to see that they are few and far between. If you’re wondering for whom the bell tolls…and just skipped the title of this little review…today we’re taking a look at Fire City: End of Days from director Tom Woodruff Jr.

Does that name sound familiar? It should…especially if you’ve watched the last 2 Alien films. [The not so good ones. – Ed.] You see, he and his usual associate Alec Gillis, provided the make-up and creature effects for those films…including the Xenomorphs. Having said that, Fire City ends up playing like a demo reel for what Woodruff and Gillis’ studio can do…and to their credit, they continue to do damn fine work for the most part. Some of the demons, especially Ford, looked like perhaps they reached a little too far with the design and the end result looks artificial, but overall, the make-up effects and creature effects are solid.

You’ll notice that while I usually open with a breakdown of the plot and then go into the review, I didn’t do that here. The movie does indeed have a plot about a group of demons that live on Earth within an apartment building who feed on the suffering of those within or near the building. This starts to change once a demon actually stops a little girl from getting raped by her mother’s abusive boyfriend. After that, all is right with the world…said abusive boyfriend gets his act together and gets a job, the constantly-fighting couple down the hall is suddenly madly in love all over again…oh, and the humans are actually catching glimpses of the demons in their true form (they appear human unless they pierce or puncture or…I dunno, I think it was a ‘p’ word…anyway, a little blood-letting allows a human to see them au natural). All of this results in the group of demons slowly starving away, they begin to turn on one another…blah, blah, blah. The premise itself is interesting and to its credit, the trailer for the movie paints it as such. Unfortunately, the way the screenwriters handle it…well, the film ultimately ends up feeling like a goth kid’s fan-fiction. It tries to be cryptic, it tries to be smart…but it all comes off as ham-fisted and, again, like a goth kid trying too hard to show he can write a story where the ugly things are good and the pretty things are bad. Honestly, this is probably where the producers should have stepped in and…wait…the screenwriters WERE the producers. Ugh. Yeah, so this was gonna happen no matter what. Sigh.

Well, short and sweet. To borrow from living legend Joe Bob Briggs, special drive-in award for Kimberly Leemans for trying to seduce the now-happy but then-codependent lovers with a strip tease and showing off the best two special effects that Woodruff and Gillis weren’t responsible for.

Sure, I’m breaking the rules a bit, I didn’t buy this but caught it on Amazon’s Prime streaming service…but Impulse Rental Theater or Impulse Streaming Theater doesn’t exactly have the same ring to it. That being said, if you still want to check this out, in spite of my advice not to, I certainly wouldn’t pay any money for it…

#becauseihatemyself #movies #IBT