Here's what I ended up with. Lots of room for improvement.
I ended up using a blast image on a plane with alpha and a bright light.
For some reason after too much tweaking I can see the edges of the plane.
Not sure what I did.
Thanks to Tyson, I used a lot of the wall hit tutorial to make this.
Also created all my own sound effects.
A friend of mine said "Sound is 60% of what you see."
You can watch it here:
http://www.vimeo.com/10760792