Fires Down Below

A very minor porn film, Fires Down Below has been revived by two competing home-video companies simply to make a fast buck. It should not be confused with "Fire Down Below", a better than usual hardcore opus made by Ray Dennis Steckler in the same time frame.

Fran Spector plays Lylah, a war widow lamenting her husband Brian's death in Vietnam during the opening scene while masturbating. Uncredited director uses phone calls for transitions, with Lylah getting a call from Chuck, her late husband's war buddy, so she invites him over and sex ensues after some stilted improvised dialog. She calls Chuck "Brian", and film is so crudely made it isn't clear whether this is a goof and the thesps just roll with it, or if this was intentional.

Lylah catches Chuck in a threesome with a "swinger couple" on her couch and throws him out. At one point when he is the odd man out of the trio, Charles Lish as Chuck looks bewilderingly towards the camera for direction, typical of "no retakes" porn making. Lish sports distinctive tattoos, and IMDb's credits helpfully reminded me that he played the retarded brother in Walt Davis's bizarre The Demon in Miss Jones.

Another phone call announces the arrival in town of her sister-in-law Janene (Brian's sister) with her husband. They're invited over to stay for the night and have sex, with Lylah masturbating in the hallway, watching them through the slightly ajar bedroom door.

This essentially all-sex opus is incomplete in both DVD and DVD-R versions on the market. The After Hours Cinema edition features some black & white flashback footage of Vietnam War fighting at the beginning, and is two minutes longer during the early reels compared to Something Weird Video.

However, AHC is missing the final reel of the film entirely, which runs about seven minutes in the SWV edition. After Lylah's scene in the hallway as a voyeur, final SWV DVD-R sequence has her finding a bearded guy (Gene Rowland) wandering outside, who claims to have grown up in the house she now owns. She sheepishly mentions her guilty pleasure of watching her sister-in-law make love, and after a token protest she makes love to Gene.

Substituting for this missing reel, AHC has a fast fadeout & in for a four-minute interview with married team Jan Davis and Pete Dawson, who played Lylah's in-laws. This odd epilog is the usual self-serving "I'm in the adult industry and proud of it" drivel with Pete doing most of the talking. Only funny/interesting moment is when he maintains: "we don't want to do films with animals". I guess that means that the porn remake of Mr. Ed is OUT.