Also known as Gates of Hell Part II: Dead Awakening - while having nothing to do with Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead, which was released in the U.S. with that title - is at least dedicated to the Italian director who is referred to as the Godfather of Gore.

This is the lone directorial effort from G.D. Marcum, who worked on the camera crew for films like Interface and the Fred Williamson movies South Beach, Steele's Law, Thee Days to a Kill and Night Vision.

After some mysterious disappearances in Fort Worth, Texas, Sandra Curtis - the sister of one of the victims - hires Nick Berkley to find her lost sibling. They soon learn that a cult that worships Moloch - so they're going to Bohemian Grove? - is behind everything and that there's an amulet that can stop them. Also - a cat gets killed and put inside Sandra's refrigerator at one point.

Tamara Hext, who played Sandra, also appeared in the TV movie Frequent Flyer and was on Dallas for one episode. She was Miss Texas and the fourth runner up to the 1985 Miss America pageant. Since Texas is pretty much the pageant capital of the world, she had to have been pretty tough. She's also the mother of Colorado Rockies outfielder Sam Hilliard.

There's plenty of cool artwork for this movie, but I love that some of the VHS boxes ripped off the artwork from Funeral Home.

Through the Fire starts one dark night on a lonely road where Marilyn Curtis has a flat tyre on her car, no-one is about so she decides to change it herself but she is far from alone as someone or something attacks her... Five weeks later & Marilyn's sister Sandra (Tamara Hext) has hit the bottle pretty hard since her sister's disappearance, a good-natured cop named Nick Berkley (Tom Campitelli) shows a bit of kindness by taking her home one night after she has had far too much to drink. Sandra phones Nick the next day & ask's if she can hire him to investigate Marilyn's disappearance, it's not the sort of thing Nick would normally do but he books a week off work & agrees to spend it searching for Marilyn. While at Marilyn's house a delivery boy (Greg Cagle) hands Sandra & Nick a package addressed to Marilyn, inside is an amulet belonging to Marilyn which has some strange markings on it. Upon further investigation the marks point to the fact that Marilyn was in fact a 'destroyer', someone who wanders the world killing any disciple's of an evil demon or something like that. This amulet has immense power & other sinister character's want it & there's meant to be some sort of demon running around & I really don't want to think about Through the Fire anymore so I'll leave it there not that much actually happens to talk about you understand.

Executive produced, co-written & directed by Gary Marcum Through the Fire is a throughly wretched piece of film-making, it has no redeeming features whatsoever & is total crap from start to finish. I'm sorry to be so blunt but the basic fact of the matter is that I have been on a really bad run of films lately, sure you expect a few stinkers in there but it seems almost every film I've taken a chance on recently has been complete & utter crap while Through the Fire is no exception & in fact is as bad as any film I've endured this year, or any year thinking about it. The script by Marcum & Brad Potter is an absolute mess, it's as slow as you can imagine, it's a great deal less exciting than watching paint dry or grass grow, the narrative & story are all over the place & worst of all it's boring, now I can forgive bad effects, dodgy acting & the like but when a film bores me to tears there's simply no excuse. I hate this film, I hate everything about it & I want the 90 excruciating minutes of my life back I wasted watching this piece of pond scum. The story makes no sense, what the hell is this demon all about? It NEVER does anything until the end, why is it after those guys? What did they do? What on Earth did that security guard & the woman he was on the phone too have to do with it? Sandra Curtis, mild mannered housewife by day & tough action hero with a skill for making homemade tripwire operated grenades in the space of two minutes by night! There are so many things wrong, muddled, unexplained & just downright rubbishy that I could fill two reviews up.

Through the Fire was director Marcum's first & thankfully last film to date, there is a god after all then. He should never be allowed anywhere near a camera ever again, it's as simple & straight forward as that it really is. Forget about any sort of gore, even though the opening credits list not one but two special make-up effect guys there's barely a drop of blood in the thing & nothing anyone's going to get upset about, a cut hand, a few gunshot wounds & the old standby of someone merely drooling some fake blood. Even though Sandra takes a shower everything is kept as clean as a whistle so forget about any nudity either.

Technically Through the Fire is awful, it's really bland, flat, forgettable & totally lifeless. The demon takes over someones body at the end & it looks OK but it's kept mainly in the shadows & is nothing more than a latex mask anyway. The acting is of a predictably low standard, don't give up your day jobs guys (then again that could apply to anyone involved with this sorry production).

Through the Fire was apparently retitled as The Gates of Hell Part II: Dead Awakening, for a start The Gates of Hell itself was a retitling of Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead (1980) & Through the Fire has absolutely NOTHING in common with & has absolutely no connection with Fulci's film whatsoever. Do yourself a favour & avoid this at all costs, no thanks is necessary.

A woman's search for her missing sister results in the discovery of a strange cult of demon-worshippers who accidentally unleashed a monstrous creature and must fight it off in order to survive.

This here was just utterly pitiful and plain bad. The detective investigation angle makes for absolutely nothing at all of any interest as the two go around and basically come away with nothing, taking up nearly half of the running time to wind up right back at the starting point and leaves it entirely useless since it's suddenly interrupted by a third party hunting the group all-along, making it unsure why that was introduced so late into the film. That makes it completely lack anything in terms of action, being restricted to a paltry gunfight in the house and the final encounter in the abandoned warehouse, which admittedly does have some good points as its dark, dank location, forever-expanded hallways and numerous rooms provides a nice battleground for a few suspenseful moments here and there, which is mixed with some energy and enthusiasm to provide some fun that way. Even still, the criminal lack of gore, either through off-screen attack/on-screen splatter thrown onto the walls, rapid-fire editing or obstructive angles makes for very little that will invite gorehounds in, and the fact that the creature is relegated to the final ten minutes makes it a non-factor in its own film and looks ridiculous when it appears. Really only has the finale to be watchable, the rest is just worthless.

Rated R: Adult Language, Graphic Violence and Brief Nudity