Fireball: Surprisingly fun movie about the dangers of steroid abuse!

I didn't have high expectations for Fireball. It looked like it would be a potential gross-out flick with scorched flesh and intestines everywhere. Instead it was easy on the senses movie with laughable special effects to simulate a burn victim. For example, the main bad guy, a disgraced football player who took designer steroids, supposedly ends up with burns over 90% of his body. The glimpses they give of him show him bald with no eyebrows (makes sense) with a bunch of red grease paint spattered with black cosmetic powder to simulate his burns (makes not so much sense). This is what I want from my B-movies! I don't need realism. I'd rather have hints with the occasional pyrotechnics. It adds to the cheese factor, and gives me the added benefit of a giggle factor, which the movies I've been watching lately are sorely lacking.

The basic plot is the football player is on the run for beating his wife. He's paid tons of money for steroids that do weird stuff to his DNA. He's being tracked down by a young FBI agent with limited social skills who used to be a fan, but after the wife beating issue has no sympathy for him. The football player has a fit over a journalist who follows him around, and ends up creating a huge scene, and gets arrested in a small town with a lot of typical small town hokey and pokey. A fire breaks out in the jail where they keep him, and that's when he ends up badly burned and hospitalized.

The FBI agent gets into town in time to meet the local fire inspector, played very well by Lexi Doig. She has a lot against her because she's all textbook and no field experience, with some emotional baggage about her firefighter father having recently died in a fire. The firefighters don't take her seriously, but she's smart, so higher-ups keep putting her in charge of situations, such as the sudden rash of fire-related deaths that begin to occur after the football player miraculously gets up from his hospital bed and escapes.

Following the football player around as he seeks revenge against everyone in the small town that wronged him, we get a lot of fun interaction between the fire inspector and the FBI agent. There's believable and entertaining chemistry between Lexi Doig and Ian Somerhalder, which is rare in these types of movies. The banter is often laugh out loud funny, and you have to pay close attention because it's delivered rapid fire. I could handle watching a series wrapped around these two, but I doubt that's going to happen.

The special effects on this movie are just perfect for the lightweight plot and tone presented. We get cool fireballs at the end that knock people down and blow things up. The ending showdown takes place in a nuclear power plant, which gives opportunities to have firefighters come in to save the day. While there are lots of problems with the 'science' they try to sell us (such as, how come the football player's clothes don't burn up when he walks around engulfed in flame?), it's still a heck of a lot of fun to watch. Overall, that's the main theme of Fireball for me: fun. Maybe because I've watched so many stinkers lately, a movie without boring zombies or gore for the sake of gore is a slam dunk. No matter, this is a movie I would like to own on DVD because it's one I could pop in and enjoy any time.

Sadly I can hardly find anything about this movie on the internet. I don't see anything about any DVD release in the future. Even the IMDB page barely has anything, and just lists Ian Somerhalder's name without naming his role! I'm going to keep looking, and hope this situation is rectified in the near future. In the meantime, if you get a chance to catch this on a re-airing on SciFi, definitely do what you have to do to watch it. It's a lot of fun, and once again proves you don't need to fall back on gross out effects when you have a decent plot, decent writing, and good actors!