Review of Damnation Alley

It's truly unfortunate and even mildly depressing how your personal perception changes over the years. I remember seeing this film on late night television when I was a young lad and I instantly loved it for life … or at least I thought I would at the time. "Damnation Alley" has a lot of elements to appeal to young and naive audiences, especially 15 to 20 years ago, when computer generated effects didn't dominate cinema yet. It has the impressive heavily armored truck, gigantic mutated scorpions and carnivorous cockroaches, funnily colored skies and a massive number of explosions. Moreover, the film starred not one but two of my childhood TV idols (George Peppard of "The A-Team" and Jan-Michael Vincent of "Airwolf"). I finally re-watched "Damnation Alley" now, and what mostly astounded me was how amateurish, clumsy and boring the film is seen through the eyes of an adult! This is one seriously incoherent mess of a film, and even though the 'Landmaster' truck still remains an ultra-cool method of transportation, the rest of the scenery and special effects are pathetic and not the least bit convincing. Allegedly, Roger Zelazny's novel is a masterwork of Sci-Fi, but the movie adaptation most definitely is not. The first fifteen minutes are unimaginably dull and handle about absolutely nothing, really. Bunch of military guys, including the three male protagonists, sitting comfortably in their base camp whilst nuclear bombs kill 99.9% of the earth's population and even tilt the freaking planet off its axis. Later, an even stupider accident wipes out the remaining survivors at the army base so that only four people are left alive. They decide to undertake the dangerous coast-to-coast journey from California to Albany in their Landmaster truck, because they picked up vague radio signals hinting there may be other survivors. The posse quickly loses a member but also pick up a woman and a kid during, and each time they make a stop there's a different menace to face. There's the earth's unbalanced and wacky climate, cannibalistic insects and – of course – the biggest horror of them all: fellow dehumanized survivors. The premise sounds like the ideal post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi stuff, and it is, but the elaboration and Jack Smight's sense of direction literally bring this film down. Being a fan of low-grade and obscure genre movies, I can tolerate bad special effects and a lack of continuity in the script, but there's a whole lot more wrong here. The characters are wooden statues and none of the actors seem really interested in providing them with emotional or intellectual depth. Tanner and Keegan are supposedly best friends (they even sing cheesy songs together), yet when Keegan dies Tanner shows no reaction or doesn't even mention his name anymore for the remainders of the film. There's almost no development in the relationships between the original travelers and the survivors they pick up along the way and throughout the entire film there isn't a single dialog that is properly written out. The sequences with the flesh-eating cockroaches and the encounter with the savage rednecks generate a few isolated peaks of suspense and thrills, but overall "Damnation Alley" is mostly uneven and tedious. And, just when you presume the film couldn't possibly sink any lower, you're faced with the most implausible and infuriating climax in the history of cinema. I can honestly say I've never witnessed a more pathetic forced happy-ending in my life.