Well, best thing about the film was the contra dance band at the end, the Hillillies from Mars, of which I am a member. Actors were competent I thought, though working with very poor material. I will say that lunch was pretty good. Though the extras didn't get the same grub as the stars. My buddy Ray, unfamiliar with the movie class system, managed to wander through the first class lunch line and get actual meat instead of the spaghetti we lowly serfs were served. Cast and crew seemed like nice folks. Strange business this second line Hollywood stuff. I think the director must have gotten tired when editing, and the writer gave up after awhile as well. Wonder what it would have been like had everyone mimed their parts?

California Firestorm (listed as Inferno on IMDb) is a somewhat entertaining, albeit predictable movie about a mother (Janet Gunn, starred on Silk Stalkings) who is the new fire chief in a northern California town. Her teen daughter (Greta Danielle Newgren) is disrespectful to her and her daughter's boyfriend (Lukas Behnken) has a reputation as a troublemaker. The movie opens with the daughter camping out one night with her boyfriend in the truck-bed of his pick-up truck, and the two of them witness a pyromaniac start forest fires using sparklers. Gunn has to lead a crew to put out the fires and find out the source of the fires, while also trying to reach out to her resentful daughter, and fighting off an ignorant town mayor (Dean Stockwell) and a suspicious volunteer firefighter (Richard Danielson).I did enjoy this movie that aired on LMN tonight. Gunn is the star here, and she looks great. Jeff Fahey was cute as the helicopter pilot. California Firestorm is typical made-for-TV stuff, except the fire storyline was what held my attention. The climax is anti-climatic, though given what happens I suppose it could be like real-life. The ending sequence is kind of cute.

Well it was just about watchable but that is where the positive points grind to halt, probably just like the career of pretty much everyone associated with this mess.Plot holes the size of Nebraska, dodgy acting, even more dodgy fire fighting and wall to wall recycled stock footage of forest fires interspersed with some terrible special effects are the main features of a film with a plot so blinding obvious you could see what was going to happen a mile off.Large slices of the plot have been lifted almost word for word from Jaws, the defiant kid who gets into trouble, the Mayor who refuses to close the road because of the tourist peak, and even more amazingly one character then goes and admits this! Anyway, the fire gets out of control thanks to their local friendly loony with the fireworks (who anyone with half a brain will identify in about a millisecond after he appears) and then its all solved as if by magic by blowing up the dam - this being achieved with the lamest explosions in the history of demolishing things.The whole film leaves a lot of unanswered questions - What happened to the fire tankers? Where did that convenient abandoned mine appear from and then just as promptly disappear to? Who put that idiot woman in charge? Did we really need the pointless closing scene at the dance with the flashbacks? What was with the random pointless slow motion shots? What on earth was Dean Stockwell (as the Mayor) doing in this rubbish? If you like a laugh at cheap poorly researched B Movie style disaster flicks (and there seem to be an awful lot of them floating around) then go and find this on DVD - my local supermarket is flogging this travesty for just 97p - and I expect many will still think they have been robbed!!

You know this is going to be a bad film right from the beginning : The fire can be seen from a road - yet they drop in smoke jumpers? You don't jump into a fire that you ca see from the road. After the jumpers get on the ground, the "veteran" says he wants to attack the fire from the uphill side? Fire always runs uphill! Ask the guys that died at Mann Gulch or Storm King Mountain in Colorado how attacking fires from uphill works out. When they are walking to the fire, the sound of the wind is blowing loudly in the background, but none of the vegetation is moving at all and the fire isn't wind blown. After they have tried for a few minutes to put out the fire, a Sikorsky S76 helicopter appears and makes a water drop right on the fire without any planning? If they could have put it out with a water drop, they would have done that first. When the fire is "contained" and the entirely bogus rescue has been carried off, the "chief" calls for a helicopter and flies back to town - if they could have flown into the fire, then they would have sent a helicopter attack in, not smoke jumpers. Later, after commandeering the helicopter to look for her daughter, the "chief" rappels down from the helicopter, (without throwing any rope out first) in to trees and abandons the firefighting effort. Then she gets stuck in the tree, (while still attached to the helicopter), and then falls out of the tree while trying to get down.Unfortunately, the movie goes down hill from there. The dialog is terrible. The plot is contrived, (and entirely predictable). The special effects are about what I would expect from this kind of movie, in other words, really bad. Acting swings from non-existent to way over acting. If a movie has a good plot, sometimes you can be persuaded to suspend belief enough to enjoy the movie. In other instances, if the special effects are outstanding sometimes you can live with no plot. This is not either of that those types of movie.Even if you know nothing about wildland fires or wildland fire fighting, this movie is not worth the film used to make it. If you like movies with plot, dialog, acting and a decent premise, this is not one of them.Apparently, this movie is also shown under the title, "California Firestorm." If anything, that is even a less apt title than "Inferno."