Damnation Alley (1977)

That was an excellent one.

How sad is this?

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

I am still struggling to get over just how awful this film is. The beginning is dull and tedious. None of it makes sense. They don't even attempt to make it scientifically accurate at all. The acting and dialogue are stilted. The ending is bizarre. I can't really come up with anything positive to say about it.

I haven't read Damnation Alley but I've read some books by Roger Zelazny that I really liked - Bridge of Ashes, Isle of the Dead, Lord of the Light, and the entire Amber series - so I decided to watch Damnation Alley.I decided to give Damnation Alley 2 stars instead of one because it is mercifully short, at just over 1.5 hours long, and because it has an interesting premise even if the execution is not very good. The main problem with Damnation Alley is that things just happen. There's no plot. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem if the characters were interesting. One book I like that doesn't have a plot (I can't really think of a movie I like that doesn't have a plot) is The Catcher in the Rye. The Catcher in the Rye is entertaining because Holden Caulfield is an interesting character. George Peppard's character and Paul Winfield's character came close to being interesting but they weren't developed enough. Also, the special effects are pretty bad. The giant scorpions close to the beginning of the movie are especially atrocious.Damnation Alley isn't even so bad it's good. It's far too boring for that.

Based on Roger Zelazny's novel, film tells the story of a sudden nuclear war that breaks out between the U.S. & Russia, leaving a devastated world which has tipped on its axis. Despite this calamity, a group of survivors at a missile bunker(among them George Peppard & Jan Michael Vincent) must take to the road in armored RVs after the bunker is accidentally destroyed, where they encounter weird weather, hostile people, and killer cockroaches...all the while trying to reach the safe haven of New Jersey.Strange film has a good cast, and effective action scenes(not to mention an impressive RV, the film's highlight) but an ultimately silly and absurd story, that doesn't bother with things like plausibility and scientific accuracy. A real shame, because the elements were there, it just doesn't come together satisfactorily.

I can personally guarantee that if you saw this thing in 1981 when you were 10 years old, you thought it was the coolest thing ever. Outside that rather limited demographic, Damnation Alley is just another 70s flick that has aged badly. From an assload of stock footage to an ending that feels like they just cut off the last 30 pages of the script when the production ran out of money, this movie is a reminder that schlock has always been around in Hollywood.After an opening 10 minutes that plays out like the alternate ending to War Games, we find the Earth devastated by a nuclear war. At one lone remaining outpost in California, Major Eugene Denton (George Peppard) has finally gotten ready to launch an expedition to the only other place he's gotten any sign of life from…Albany, New York. Joined by Tanner and Keegan (Jan-Michael Vincent and Paul Winfield), two former officers who ditched the military when the world went up in smoke, they clamber aboard a military superbus and set off on the only cross country path not steaming with radiation. This brave new world includes giant scorpions, flesh-eating cockroaches, super storms and gun-toting hillbillies, yet much of the movie consists of very undramatic driving scenes underscored by extremely dramatic music from Jerry Goldsmith. Our intrepid trio find a surviving female in Las Vegas and the future Rorschach in a shack, only to have all their problems solved when the Earth suddenly heals itself overnight.The highlights of Damnation Alley are George Peppard admirably making an effort to do more here than just cash a paycheck and the aforementioned superbus, which the even more aforementioned 10 year old in 1981 absolutely thought was the neatest thing he'd ever seen. With a missile rack on top, a flexible middle and a tri-wheel drive system that appeared to actually work in real life, the superbus was an pre-adolescent's dream car. I would also guess building it consumed about 75% of the budget for this motion picture. At least that's the only acceptable reason I can come up with for the incredibly cheap look of everything else.The lowlights include what may be one of the first "black guy as designated victim in a sci-fi/horror film" roles, Jan-Michael Vincent trying to play an edgy rebel and giving the character all the emotional anguish of a Tiger Beat cover boy, and that anachronistic 70s thing where big screen films now look like bad TV movies. I'm not sure why or how it happened, but a lot of 70s cinema was made with bad sets and hackneyed camera work. You don't see it in the 60s, where even low-budget crap is still recognizable as intended for the big screen. You don't see it in the 80s, where a sheen of technical sameness crept over the industry. But in the 70s it became weirdly common to see sets that look like something out of the Carol Burnett Show and direction that screams "I was an intern for one season on McMillan and Wife!"Unfortunately, Damnation Alley doesn't sink so low it qualifies as "so bad it's good". This is just plain old bad, poorly plotted dreck. Unless you're a 10 year old in 1981 somehow reading this review through a space-time vortex, find something better to watch.