Entry Thirty-Two: Damnation Alley (1977)

Damnation Alley (1977)

Dir: Jack Smight

"You have seen great adventures.  You are about to live one."

Tonight in the Basement of Sleaze, join me on a family-friendly tour of post-nuke America as we rocket down...Damnation Alley!

Sometime after the end of World War III, long-haired, dirt bike-riding hothead Jan-Michael Vincent (The Mechanic, TV's Airwolf) and his "I'm just here to die 'cause I'm the black guy" best friend, Paul Winfield (Sounder, The Terminator) join straight-laced military man George Peppard (Breakfast at Tiffany's, TV's The A-Team) in his silly-looking "Landmaster" armored truck.  They're traveling the titular irradiated expanse from California to New York in hopes of finding fellow survivors.  In Vegas, they play slots in an abandoned casino and pick up a woman (Dominique Sanda,
Steppenwolf).  After Winfield is consumed alive by armored, flesh-eating cockroaches in an infested city, they rescue teenager Jackie Earle Haley (The Bad News Bears, Watchmen).  They kill the shit out of a town filled with rapist thieves and survive radiation storms and a flood before finding salvation with an agrarian society of survivors in Albany.

Damnation Alley has a solid (if derivative) story, but it's undone by a script with no real character development (not even the cliche "hothead vs. straight-arrow" conflict implied by the character differences between Vincent and Peppard is explored much after the first few minutes) and indifferent, TV-movie like direction by Smight (Midway).  Even the scene in the empty casino, which should be both surreal and joyful, a moment of release for these men as they reconnect with something from the old, dead world, falls flat.  The effects are pretty lousy, too (though people under the influence of controlled substances might enjoy the colorful, animated irradiated sky effects).  If you want to introduce a young child to the joys of post-nuke cinema, this is a safe bet, as it's pretty inoffensive.  Damnation Alley is probably best remembered today as a major blunder by the 20th Century Fox marketing department: early on in production, they decided that this was to be their big blockbuster for 1977 and they threw most of their marketing budget behind it.  This left very little money to promote a weird, low-budget space movie that the studio felt nobody would understand or want to see called Star Wars.  Oops.