User Reviews

I had fond memories of this movie having seen it as when I was young in the early 80's, and then I made the huge mistake of watching it again recently.

There is no real plot to speak of, it's a straight story of a trip from point A to point B, the acting, what little of it there was, was fairly bad, and the special effects were anything but special.

I must assume most of the budget was spent building the Landmaster, because the effects were horrible, even for the period when this came out, especially when you consider Star Wars came out the same year.

I would say give this a miss, especially if you saw it as a child.

The beginning of this film really shakes you up. The careful, measured tones coming from the missile base loudspeaker announcing the progress of "the war" belie the fact that at that moment scores of millions of people are being atomized as the bombs fall.

However, the aftermath seems to be typical post-nuclear mis-adventure, with the survivors from the base starting out on a cross-country road trip. The "Landmaster" vehicles add a jazzy and technie touch to the otherwise predictable trip. Wild weather, crazed hermits, and killer cockroaches require a little suspension of disbelief, but still keep the pace going.

Fans of "The A-Team" will like seeing George Peppard in a lead role, as the by-the-book superior officer who tries to keep the non-conformist junior officer (Vincent) in line. Dominique Sanda adds some nice eye candy as the token female member of the intrepid band of pilgrims, rescued by Peppard and company from the ruins of Las Vegas.

Overall, a pretty good film if you are looking for an evening of distraction and non-reality, if you can get past the opening sequence.

Killer cockroaches, Jan Michael Vincent, Paul Winfield, George Peppard, giant scorpions, ultimate SUV's, inbred hillbilly types and dusty old Las Vegas where the slots still work...all combine to make a fun little, albeit cheesy, flick.

As a kid this movie was a fun Saturday matinee movie and to this day, still a fun Saturday Matinee movie...grab a big bucket of popcorn, turn your brain off and have some cheesy fun...

This notoriously hard to get (at least legitimately) movie follows the travails of five nuke apocalypse survivors in the late 1970s. Their task is to drive their armored personnel vehicle cum Winnabago from Bakersfield CA to Albany NY. On the way they stop off in Vegas, Salt Lake City and Detriot bumping into maniac mutant cockroaches and some radioactive hillbillies along the way. 99% of the time the sky is a swirling orangish red that transfers its Gatorade hues to most sequences in this movie. The locations are all dust, sand and rock... this is after all Damnation Alley and the Earth has been tilted off its axis. An absolute trash B movie that I'm sure many of those associated with would rather forget, it is nonetheless hugely compelling. After viewing you can appreciate the cult classic status of this film, yet to not be entirely sure why that is so.

Damnation Alley was quite an unlucky movie seemingly, it was put out with the idea that it would be another profitable sci-fi b-movie but unfortunately for it, a few weeks before it was released a movie called Star Wars was released which changed the rules for sci-fi forever more. To be honest though, I kind of like this one. It has its own significant factors too, for instance it's quite early in the cycle of post-apocalypse movies - the Mad Max series certainly seems to have borrowed some of its ideas – and so I think it's fair to say that its core look and feel went on to be used in quite a few similar movies in the 80's. Its story starts with a nuclear war devastating the world, leaving a small band of survivors in a desert outpost. After a while they are forced to set off on a journey to try and find other survivors in an all-terrain vehicle.

This one has a plot that boils down to a succession of set-pieces strung together along a hazardous trek. It's essentially a road movie...without a road. Along the way our heroes battle giant scorpions, swarms of flesh-eating cockroaches, mutant feral humans and they endure an electrical storm. They also pick up a woman and an incredibly annoying teenage boy. The film is chock full of corny dialogue and charmingly poor special effects but it remains entertaining nevertheless with good pacing and enough variety of events to ensure things remain interesting. It has to be admitted though that it does end with a very poorly conceived conclusion that felt like it was tagged on because the original idea was too expensive. But on the whole, I found this to be good fun mainly, certainly a fair bit better than its poor reputation suggests.

A film I wanted to like, but I was left feeling quite indifferent. This adaptation of Roger Zelazny's novel turns out to be a junky, often exaggerated piece of cheap post-apocalyptic drive-in schlock that pales alongside its inspiration. The problem mainly lied with it lack of plot episodes within this road movie through a dangerous landscape and the ones they went with were quite flat and half-baked (obviously outside the killer cockroaches segment). In some aspects its budget couldn't entirely match its vision. What made the feature though were its steady performances (Paul Winfield is always a delight) and of course how can you pass on that vehicle --- "The Landmaster". Where can I buy me one of those? George Peppard and Jan Michael Vincent lead the cast, as two U.S Air force soldiers who survive a nuclear holocaust caused by WW3, causing the earth to tilt on its axis creating freak weather patterns (storms, floods) and mutated insects. So a small crew head out in two armoured vehicles through radiation affected areas known as "Damnation Alley" in their journey for survivors and a safe area. Also coming for a ride are Dominique Sanda, Kip Niven and a young Jackie Earle Haley who's pretty good at chucking stones. The special effects that are projected are chintzy with some blotchy optical effects. While limited, it has its moments, but I wished a little more did happen and that ending couldn't be any more sickening (, in a suger-coated sense).

"Nothing good happens by itself."

This is a really fun movie if you like post-atomic flicks! Or any Jan Michael Vincent flick, for that matter. The effects are sometimes cheesy, but overall the atmosphere and film-work on this are pretty decent! It's also fun to see Jan Michael 'AIRWOLF' with George Peppard "A TEAM" together. They make a good pair! The 'bug' scene is very fun- and includes some great Jan Michael motorcycle wheelies! The tornado scene is also cool. This movie definitely takes you to a different world, and the strange sky color throughout sort of makes everything seem - well- post atomic! It's a clever movie, not too violent, but it definitely is worth the buy! If you are a Jan Michael fan, this would be a MUST have as he looks fantastic as usual.

Silly post-apocalypse road movie is amusing enough to give it some sort of cult status, even though it's really not that good. The actors giving the better performances tend to get less screen time. One can see that the filmmakers, led by director Jack Smight, are clearly working against the limits of special effects technology at the time, rendering this more of a cheese fest than anything else. Those light shows in the stormy skies ARE pretty trippy, though. Pacing is adequate enough; this runs a scant 92 minutes long. But that makes one wish that more could have been done with the source material, a novel by Roger Zelazny (adapted for the big screen by Alan Sharp ("Night Moves" '75) and Lukas Heller ("What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?")). The movie is modestly diverting, but also disappointing.

WWIII causes complete devastation throughout the continental United States. A team of Air Force personnel who have designed ultra cool tanks / vans dubbed "Landmasters" decide to take the safest path possible (which one of them has named "Damnation Alley") to Albany, the only place from which they've ever received a radio signal. The characters include domineering tough guy Denton (George Peppard), cheerful Tanner (Jan-Michael Vincent), leading lady Janice (Dominique Sanda), easygoing Keegan (Paul Winfield) and teenager Billy (Jackie Earle Haley).

The odd lack of continuity creates some guffaw-inducing WTF moments; watch as switches are made from real people to dummies. The visual effects can charitably be described as negotiable. Still, there's some fun to be had in seeing giant scorpions super imposed on the desert settings. And if people aren't squirming from seeing those, there's an onslaught of killer armour-plated cockroaches that make quick work of one poor guy. Hell, there's even a bunch of survivalist rednecks (led by Robert Donner, who sports a hilariously ridiculous looking beard) with which to contend.

Co-starring Kip Niven ("New Year's Evil") as another of the military guys, this also features Murray Hamilton in a noticeable but non-speaking uncredited role.

At the very least, this has some decent widescreen photography by Harry Stradling Jr. and a typically excellent score by the always reliable Jerry Goldsmith.

This is one of the rare cases where it would be interesting to see somebody attempt another version of the tale.

Six out of 10.

A stogie-chewing George Peppard heads a team that welds together an armored vehicle out of spare parts, taking satisfaction when a plan comes together.... Jan-Michael Vincent mans an AWOL missile-firing government vehicle copiloted by a cranky white-haired guy....

Capsule descriptions of "Airwolf" and "The A-Team"? No, you'd be better off watching an episode of either of those shows, but unfortunately I'm describing "Damnation Alley", the wildly unfaithful movie adaptation of the novel by brilliant Sci-Fi author Roger Zelazny.

Now, I'm sure few Zelazny fans would disagree that "Alley" is one of the least of his works, but this film takes Zelazny's somewhat decayed fruit and manages to squeeze onto the floor whatever juice it had in it, leaving only the decay.

All that remains of the book is the basic setting, the cross-post-apocalyptic-country road trip plot device (though with the book's suspenseful motivation for the trip replaced by a vague "let's see what's over there"), the "Run the storm or dig in?" scene, and a main character named Tanner. Well, I *guess* you can call him the main character. Just as Tanner and Denton take equal turns driving the truck (no, I will not call it a "Landmaster" -- Zelazny never would have given it such a dorky appellation), not even needing to tussle over the usual single steering wheel, Vincent and Peppard seem to be given completely equitable screen time in which to shine, an opportunity they each squander in equal measure.

Notice I did not say *Hell* Tanner. No, this is not the novel's violent last-of-the-Hell's-Angels anti-hero, but instead a pretty mild military boy who's, well, kind of cocky I guess, and, uh, likes to ride a dirt bike... (cue faux expectant look). But at least Tanner is inspired by the book. The rest of the characters are, well, uninspired, and purely the invention of the screenwriters.

And as for the setting, it's close enough to be recognizable, but is not the world that Zelazny was exploring in the book. Different post-apocalypse stories have chosen to stake their respective posts at different points along the timeline, from "28 Days Later" to the far-flung dystopias of "Planet of the Apes" and "The Time Machine". In the novel, Zelazny looked at the world a generation after the holocaust, an interesting point to examine, where government has established control again in the remaining population centers, and the recognizably ordinary lives people can lead in these pockets of safety is in sharp contrast to the nightmare world that lays down the road apiece. Instead of keeping this setting, though, the authors of this film decided to go with a world maybe a year or two after the bombs, which presents a much less interesting vantage than any of the time-points noted above. But even life at this point along the eternal road could have been interesting to examine, had the movie taken the time to do so. Unfortunately it did not, so I must respectfully disagree with those commenters who said that this was one thing the movie did well. What we get instead is mostly some people riding around the country and encountering dangerous situations that could be successfully transplanted to any time period.

I likewise must disagree with those that said that the movie did a good job portraying the experience of the military officers who witnessed the end of the world at the beginning of the film. While I realize that military personnel are trained to remain calm and productive under pressure, these folks witnessing the huge barrage of nuclear warheads showering down upon America didn't appear to be under pressure at all! People were milling casually around or sitting and doing their usual paperwork while the world ended! Pretty much the only expression of angst or concern we get is when Jan-Michael puts his head in his hands at the end of the sequence, but his portrayal could serve equally well for some other movie's 50th-billing character Man With Headache.

Other random things I must criticize: George Peppard's accent isn't particularly badly done, I guess, but it sure is annoying.

When the one reasonably likable character makes an exit, the other characters seem not to care very much, and seem not to display any sign afterwards that they remember such a character had ever been around.

As others have also alluded to, one of the most anticlimactic endings ever.

But the film is not wholly devoid of charm. The sky effects are indeed pretty neat-looking, and I'm sorry I didn't get to see them on the big screen, though the near-complete failure to try to maintain registration between moving (or even stationary!) ground and sky elements is very jarring and fake-looking.

Speaking of the sky, the film also does a commendable job of recreating the bizarre, scary, and vengeful weather depicted in the book.

The score is certainly not among Jerry Goldsmith's best work, but it's better than the material it underscores, and it has some kewl analog synth squawks you don't get to hear in his other work.

The truck is also pretty cool, though the stretchy material connecting the two halves looks comically flimsy in the harsh environments the truck rides through. Not surprised to hear that's the one element that does not survive on the show vehicle today.

But I have to say that if you insist on watching a movie where the main characters venture out from one of the remaining safe pockets of humanity in a dangerous post-apocalyptic world in their heavily armored, missile-firing truck, and occasionally drive dirt bikes out of the back of it, you would do much better to watch George Romero's "Land of the Dead" instead. (If the Landmaster or other elements of "Damnation Alley" provided any inspiration to "Land of the Dead", it's by far the best thing this bastard child of Zelazny has given to the world.)

Wowza!

Now this movie aint great (far from it) but it aint horrid either. Just yer basic post nuclear sci-fi apocalypse survival flick.

Survivors get from point A to point B with a bunch of trouble in between. The trouble actually doesn't add up to much (look for roaches!) and the acting and storyline are at a minimum....BUT!!!!!!

The following things kicked ass!:

Beginning!--->creepy slow suspense as the world faces nuclear destruction!

Score!--->Great music sets the tone for the scenes (saving many)

Sky FX!--->tripped out! The skies are the best looking I've seen in any apocalyptic movie...way cool!

The SUV!!--->They actually built this thing! it works and works great! No scale model here, although I'm sure its looks are best viewed on the outside, but its done well, not cheap, handles the road great, and if i could find one, I'd buy it (look carefully at wheel design....amazing!)

Dats it, Dats all. B-movie sci-fi fun. No brainer..great for 2 for 1 rental, follow it with something that will get brain workin again.

I liked this movie, the land rover scenes were the best part of the movie. the land rover was also used in a few other movies. i think the cyborg movie.

this movie was cheesy some, however with a bigger budget and a modern rewrite, this could be well liked, from virus to global warming or ice age.

It's them in the high tech land rovers that captured people and the neat stuff. in this day in age, it appears bad. But back in 1977, it was good.

The idea, people can survive after a nuke war, well we know if ya did it would be bad, but there has not really been a movie of survival after and during a lot of different disasters.

How bad is it? 26 years later I STILL feel robbed for having paid to see this joke. Caught it on TV last night, and forced myself to "give it a second chance". Wrong move!! There is nothing redeeming about this movie - special effects are terrible, dialogue stinks, each turn of events is so implausible that you get mad at everyone involved.

SPOILER (not that it matters...) Final ridiculous turn - the entire world has been destroyed by nuclear war, but they find one area that wasn't targeted by a nuke and therefore is still a beautiful green sunny place, with no radiation and no nuclear winter and little children playing ball. Give me a break!

Apparently, this film was adapted from a book that was a bit darker and gritty than what we get here. What that is precisely, cheese. That being said, I also have to mention that I enjoy cheese so I enjoyed this film. Some of the effects are very dated now and when watching it again there are a few number of scenes in this one that were clearly padding, but I still enjoy it. Jan-Michael Vincent and George Peppard star in this movie, but the kid that turns up in the film was Jackie Earle Haley who was in Watchmen as Rorschach and suffice to say, you can definitely tell that it is him!

The story of this one has the world going through World War III which not only causes radiation, but also causes the world to shift its axis which causes storms the likes of which man has never seen before. Survivors at a military base decide to trek across country after an incident destroys and kills most of the men at the base in the hopes of making it to Albany where they had received a signal indicating that there may be more people alive. They go across country in two huge all terrain vehicles, but one of them is taken out rather early by a storm. They find a couple of other survivors along the way as well as a town infested with roaches, radiated rednecks and even more storms!

The film pretty much has them traveling through the wasteland with there being a few stops here and there and generally when there were stops, they either found something or there was trouble! We see Las Vegas, then Salt Lake City, but then we are not really shown where they are until they make it to Detroit. They kind of skipped ahead a bit as they make Albany kind of quickly. Granted, who wants to see every thing that happens, but it would have been cool to see a few more obstacles along the way!

In the end, I enjoyed the film. I liked the characters of Tanner and Denton as they do not exactly become good friends during the course of their journey, but the relationship improves as it goes. I really liked the cockroaches of Salt Lake as it was a better done scene than anything in the movie, "The Nest" which was about roaches! The vehicles were rather cool and overall it was a fun movie. The effects are not the greatest in the movie, but they do make the world seem like it is in the aftermath of a nuclear war, that is, until the end where it looks like everything is pretty much normal. I doubt everything would be completely back to normal in such a short time frame. Still, it is a nice distraction for an hour and a half and typical of those weird 70's science fiction films, just not quite as weird.

"Damnation Alley" is a dumb film. I can't say it any plainer then that. It takes place after a nuclear disaster. There are only a handful of survivors left. George Peppard leads the pack looking as if he can't wait for "The A Team" to come along.

The survivors make their way around in a trumped up camper. Jan-Michael Vincent plays the standard hunky hero. This was near the end of his successful run in the 70's. Movies like this did him in (though he would bounce back nicely the next year in "Hooper" with Burt Reynolds).

One scene that is well done and worth noting is when the crew is overtaken by a deadly breed of cockroaches. It was quite effective on the big screen with stereo sound but, sadly, loses much of its potence on television.

The special effects are mostly cheap looking with obvious sets in many scenes.

"Damnation Alley" is not even a good time waster. You'll be so busy laughing at its silliness or shaking your head at the effects that it is likely to make you feel as empty as the world its characters inhabit.

Jack Smight must have been distressed at getting such cheesy directorial assignments such as "Airport 1975" and, a few years later, this weak science-fiction entry. Once a solid TV director with a few interesting feature films to his credit, Smight's resume tailed off in the 1970s with lame titles such as "Damnation Alley", a second-feature if there ever was one. Survivors of the nuclear holocaust roam the desolate wasteland in a futuristic van, searching for others. Nice to know in the future we'll still have second-rate casinos in this country, equipped with slot-machines circa 1977. One revolting sequence involving blood-sucking cockroaches might have become a classic among splatter aficionados had the special effects budget been larger (when the roaches, en masse, chase Jan-Michael Vincent on his cycle, it looks like a carpet being pulled along by a wire). The cast of actors, George Peppard and Jackie Earle Haley among them, do OK work in an obviously inferior product. *1/2 from ****

I enjoy this every time I watch it. Science Fiction with some very good and some mediocre visual effects. The cast does a good job. I liked the vehicle the "Landmaster." Jack Earle Haley, the kid in this movie is currently in a series on television, and it's pretty good. Most of the movie takes place as the people go from one place to another in the Landmaster, and the people and things they meet. Jan Michael Vincent and Haley get some motorcycle riding in. This was out of print for some while, also the newest DVD of this movie is slightly different than the one I originally saw. It is well worth the price of a rental, check it out and see what you think.

Throughout the beginning of the last half of the 20th century, multiple films have been made that were based off of novels that took place in dystopic wastelands after nuclear fallout. This was all due to the U.S. and Russia being two of the biggest super powers at the time and were currently having a cold war over it. Well this science fiction genre film is no different in that aspect. But everything else about it isn't entertaining at all.

Damnation Alley (1977) is a film adaptation of novelist Roger Zelazny's short story of the same name. And honestly, I think Zelazny's work was more enjoyable than this. This whole movie is just one giant traveling expedition. There is no plot. Did the writers bother to even jot down the plot or did they just create dialog for the characters? I mean Lukas Heller, the screenwriter from The Dirty Dozen (1967) was on the crew list! Did he become lazy and decide to let Alan Sharp do all the work? And that's just the plot, let's dive into the characters.

The storyline follows Major Eugene Denton played by George Peppard and a small band of misfit characters. That's right, John Hannibal Smith from the original A-Team (1983) stars in this film. Unfortunately, he did not make a wise choice to join this slog of a mess. Along with Peppard is a young Jan-Michael Vincent, who earlier starred in the classic The Mechanic (1972), Paul Winfield who later would play a role in Schwarzenegger's The Terminator (1984) and even Jackie Earle Haley has a part as a homeless kid. Yes! Even the actor who plays Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) remake and Rorschach from Zack Snyder's Watchmen (2009) plays in this movie.

Oh and I have no idea how this girl named Janice (Dominique Sanda) even held her own at Las Vegas inside a gambling building with a bunch of sand. Not to mention but she's just there to be an annoying damsel in distress. Not needed. But enough about her. Here there's barely anything for these characters to expand on. What's made up for lost time, is filler with either traveling through wasteland or trying to survive radioactive storms. Isn't it amazing how well the cast was put together even before half these actors were famous and still this movie couldn't get much of anything right? Truly sad.

The writers are really to blame for this film. Every ten minutes it would be a reoccurring plot point. Travel a little, stop a little, and every time they stopped, they'd either run into someone or something. Sometimes it's human, other times they're over-sized killer animals. It's just lame. Oh and let's not forget that every time they stop, Jan- Michael Vincent has to pull out his trusty motorcycle to solve all his problems. He uses it for everything!

Not even composer Jerry Goldsmith could save this movie. Never have I heard a score so weird that it I couldn't tell what it was trying to represent. The music sounds like a cross between a video game and real orchestra music. Also it didn't help that for majority of the time, the music was absent. The score is so minimal it is barely even used in any of the important scenes. Even the introduction had me sitting awkward. Nuclear warheads are blowing up the country and there's no music going on at all?! I mean, that's what it would be like in real life but this is a movie! It's supposed to enhance that experience.

The only points I do give it, is for having the really cool looking landmaster vehicle and a couple good special effects. The effects were standard but SOME of the way the sky's were constructed. They were rather neat. I was more interested in that than the story or characters. The landmaster was also cool. Twelve wheels, rockets, could even be used in the ocean and an extended cabin? What a fortress. That is definitely a vehicle that could withstand nuclear fallout. Besides this, the film is a wreck unfortunately.

This science fiction film adaptation is a boring trek about a story that's not even being told. The whole film is just random events put together.