Film Review: Damnation Alley
by Vic Neptune
Damnation Alley (1977), based on Roger Zelazny’s 1969 novel of the same name, deals with a post-nuclear war Earth and the scattering of survivors dealing with fallout and overall bad environmental conditions. One band of survivors get word of an area near Albany, New York, untouched by the fallout, a place where things grow and people live there, too. Tanner (Jan-Michael Vincent), called Hell Tanner in the book, is an amiable fellow who could almost be in The Dukes of Hazzard, so far removed is he from the tough anti-hero Tanner of Zelazny’s novel.
Still, Jan-Michael Vincent was an appealing actor with significant range, but in this film he seems dead above the eyebrows. He and Denton (George Peppard) take two armored vehicles resembling Elon Musk’s Cybertruck crossed with a tardigrade. The filmmakers built this eight-wheeled monstrosity. There are many shots of the thing traversing dusty roads and rocky terrain. Above, the sky is always flashing with weird light displays. Daytime favors a pink sky, while at night it’s a deep blue.
Animals grow to huge proportions, such as the hissing Madagascar cockroaches infesting one building filled also with one armed bandits. This scene features Denton and Tanner playing with the machines, winning large amounts of useless post-apocalypse quarters, operating two or three machines at a time, having fun for the first time in years, maybe.
Then the hissing Madagascar cockroaches, oh shit!
I read the novel about twenty years ago, I’ve forgotten most of it, but I remember that unlike the movie adaptation, the novel at least made sense.
The novel serves as a platform for a good movie. It’s too bad it wasn’t given better treatment. The movie’s visual and special effects look more like high school art projects, effective in their way, but better suited to a film with a budget under a hundred dollars.
Usually, I write about films that move me, or at least films that left me with a good feeling. Damnation Alley did nothing of the sort, but one can learn from disagreeable film watching experiences as much as from the agreeable ones.
The group runs into a teenaged boy, Billy (Jackie Earle Haley). He behaves like an adolescent boy who’s grown up without his parents in an apocalyptic hell world. He helps the group deal with four men with guns occupying a service station. These men want the Cybertruck. The boy clobbers one with a rock, gets the man’s gun to Tanner, who shoots the others. It’s the one action scene in the movie, apart from the hissing cockroaches.
The group aims for Albany, New York. They get close and pick up a radio transmission. Tanner, the boy behind him on a motorcycle, rides off as an emissary from California. Shots of Tanner and the boy on the bike traveling through hilly back country in what is obviously southern California. I thought it would’ve been good to see Tanner riding through upstate New York. The last shot shows Tanner and Billy greeted by dozens of survivors living it up on the outskirts of Albany.
I remember when this movie came out. A relative of mine worked at the movie theater. He sometimes obtained merchandise, promotional stuff for movies shown at the theater. He gave me an orange tee shirt that said across the chest, DAMNATION ALLEY. I didn’t see the film until a day ago, but that story of Zelazny’s, of a man on a mission to cross a post-apocalyptic America inside a powerful armored car, a man named Hell Tanner as protagonist, gets to me somehow— I’d like to see it properly adapted into a good film, especially one retaining Tanner’s authentic character of a loner, rather than Jan-Michael Vincent’s dumb nice guy characterization.
The film seems like a lazy endeavor, as if the filmmakers had an idea in mind on how to achieve what they wanted, but their low budget prevented fulfillment of ambitions. The special and visual effects, pathetically on display during the same year as the releases of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with their dazzling imagery, made Damnation Alley look crude, like something better seen in an episode of Lost in Space. I did get used to the colorful skies of the film. They look like vistas of colored paper, more like paintings in motion than something to be taken literally--some fanciful aftereffect of nuclear weapons exchange, for instance.
It took me 48 years to see Damnation Alley. I never wore the tee shirt because when I was young I thought I wouldn’t look good in orange, red, or yellow.
Vic Neptune writes, makes movies (YouTube Channel John Berner), collages, paintings. Moves made as Rhombus. Film criticism based on thousands of movies of all eras seen. Strong interest in literature: Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, Jack London, Robert . Howard, Joan Didion, Philip K. Dick, and many others. History and religion other interests also. Favorite filmmakers: Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasonlini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Federico Fellini. Life without art is art without life.
