Andrew Borntreger of Badmovies.org fame, in his review for A Boy and His Dog (also linked below), puts forth that "You have to respect any film that starts off with a nuclear war." I'm not here to disclaim that (though I doubt Andrew has ever seen In the Year 2889), but there is no denying that for decades, such movies played on our most singular creeping fear: that someone would piss somebody else off enough to push The Button. There were opportunistic movies like The Day The World Ended that played off that fear in the late 50's, and the temperature got turned up a notch in the early 60's when the Cuban Missile Crisis added a new phrase to the geopolitical lexicon: nuclear brinkmanship. This was the atmosphere that brought us Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe, two remarkably similar yet entirely different movies. By the 70's, things had settled down a bit, but only a bit; one can live in terror only so long before the terror sublimates to a sort of doomed fatalism. We all accepted that nuclear war was a possibility, perhaps inevitable; so, before the phrase was even invented, we all partied like it was 1999. There. I have now officially blamed nuclear politics for the creation of Disco. When most people mention Damnation Alley, it is to reference one of two things: the opening segment, often sited as "one of the most chilling representations of nuclear war", or the totally boss RV our heroes use to tool around in. More on that later. We're getting ahead of ourselves. We begin at an Air Force missile base in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and meet the two guys we're going to be hanging with for the next hour and a half: Denton (George Peppard), a fairly by-the-book military type, and Tanner (Jan Michael Vincent), who is, shall we say, somewhat less than by-the-book. They pass through various security points, at one point checking in with another familiar face, Keegan (Paul Winfield), the base artist. As Keegan issues them firearms, Denton asks him what he would charge for an oil painting; he'd like his wife to pose when she gets back from Chicago. As the movie we are watching is called Damnation Alley, wagering that Chicago is not going to survive the next ten minutes is a sucker bet. Denton and Tanner, it turns out, are the guys who
are in charge of the two keys that must be turned in unison to
initiate a I don't know about chilling, but the sequence is what we used to call in the advertising trade impactful. The viewer goes from hearing the name of either his hometown or a town nearby and is swept immediately to a Technicolor (and "Sound 360") representation of what would be happening. I noted somewhat smugly that the missiles never seemed to reach Texas, especially the Houston area - but that's okay, we were nuked anyway, and by our own country, no less, in Independence Day. Anyway, after that, titles inform us that the combined nuclear explosions tilted the Earth off its axis, with the result that even more people died, the sky has turned into a Pink Floyd Laser Light Show, and the whole world now looks like Utah. The base, secure in its secluded, hardened bunker, survived. The men try to hold to some aimless semblance of normal life. Denton continues to work away in the motor bay, building something, with the assistance of Airman Perry (Kip Niven). Keegan and Tanner, however, have retired themselves
from the Air Force. Keegan spends his time painting tropical Things inside the base have gotten somewhat lax, though, and one Airman goes to sleep while smoking in bed... next to a mass of pipes bearing a sign that reads, "WARNING: Flammable Gas!" The resulting explosion is pretty impressive. The only survivors are the two nonconformists, Keegan and Tanner, and Denton and Perry, who were in the motor pool. Denton wheels out the project that has been occupying him and Perry: they've been completing the two prototype Landmasters, huge all-terrain vehicles with novel three-wheel arrangements, all sorts of high-tech stuff and missile launchers. It is Denton's intention to take the Landmasters all the way to Albany, New York, the source of the only continuous radio signal heard since The War (and it is at this point that we find out The War was two years ago).
The next stop for our trio is Las Vegas, where not
only is the Circus Circus still standing, but it still has power.
"Boy, nothin' changes," says Tanner. "Bomb or no
bomb, the lights never go out in Vegas!" Keegan and Tanner
set to playing the slots with wild abandon; even the staid Denton
finds himself grinning and pulling the levers of one-armed bandits.
This makes a lot of noise, So now our four heroes trek onto Salt Lake City, which may seem like a roundabout route to Albany, but Denton is navigating what he calls "Damnation Alley", a path that skirts the areas of highest radiation. In any case: Salt Lake City, where they stop to get some gasoline. Tanner and Janice take off on his bike to scrounge for more supplies. Keegan, examining the many automobile hulks lying about, remarks on the strangely clean bones within the cars. "It's been a couple of years," says Denton. "Yeah," mutters Keegan, "but the windows are closed." They start to pumping gas after Keegan attaches the hose to the underground tank, and Keegan notices tons of large cockroaches coming up from the hatch. These roaches resist stomping and they bite. Hard. Suddenly Keegan finds himself pursued by a raft of roaches, and forgetting the skeletons in the sealed cars, hops inside one himself.
Next stop: a mysterious shack in the middle of nowhere, to pick up a recently orphaned boy named Billy (Jackie Earle Haley), who, true to his Bad News Bears background, is deadly with a thrown rock. (There is a bit somewhere in here that I am missing, something about the Landmaster's nuclear family structure, but frankly, I don't think it's worth the trouble) Then our next stop along scenic Damnation Alley is a gas station, similarly in the middle of nowhere (the nuclear war apparently extended the boundaries of Nowhere, so its middle is likewise huge). There our heroes are surprised by a rifle-toting pack of mutants.
By this time the Landmaster's transmission is starting
to make loud clanking sounds, but no worry - the great beast was
designed to use truck parts! So a quick detour to the wrecking
yards of Detroit is called for. Now why people haven't chosen
to settle in Detroit is beyond me - the junkyard looks like it
hasn't been touched by Luckily, the Landmaster was designed to float, "Even," as Denton assures his crew, "if it's half-full of water." He and Tanner force open the top hatch to discover that the sky has miraculously turned blue! Yes, that whole welter of special effects was the Earth shifting back to its normal axis! Just to prove that point, when the Landmaster manages to churn itself to land, it no longer looks like Utah; no, there are trees and grass! Looks remarkably like California, in fact. Hmmmm... The two men set to working on their respective vehicles
by lakeside, when a sputter comes over their radio: it's a live
I probably don't need to tell you that Damnation Alley was based on a novel by Roger Zelazny, which was itself loosely based on an event in American history, the same one which was the basis for the recent animated movie Balto: a diphtheria epidemic in a remote northern settlement prompted a group of men and dogsleds to race through impossible weather and terrain to get drugs to the stricken settlement. In the novel, a load of serum needs to be taken through Damnation Alley to Boston (if I'm recalling correctly), and the only man for the job is motorcycle desperado Hell Tanner, who pilots the Landmaster alone. This might have made a compelling movie, but the changes wrought for this movie version are not onerous. Starting with the War to gain audience attention is a good idea; the reason the Landmasters even exist is reasonable; and expanding the cast opens up new dynamics. But Damnation Alley the movie fails to do much with these elements. For instance, unwritten movie law demands that if
Denton and Tanner do not like each other at the beginning of the
movie, Too, the movie is episodic in nature. Now, the novel was also episodic, but Zelazny was a master storyteller, and each encounter in the Alley served to change Tanner, to open up his humanity more, until by the end of the novel, with the Landmaster irretrievably broken, he has the strength of character to walk the rest of the way, carrying the serum like a pack mule. The episodes of Damnation Alley are simply that: episodes, with no real suspense or tension built up; there is never any real doubt that Tanner and Janice will escape the killer cockroaches, or that our heroes will whomp up on the hillbillies. I lay the blame for that on the shoulders of director Jack Smight, whose body of work consists primarily of television movies. Damnation Alley, despite its effects, looks and feels like it was shot for the small screen. For instance: in the scene where the radio reveals that there are still people alive in Albany, the actors are blocked so that their backs are to us - we cannot see their faces at this climactic moment. I will, however, give Smight this - I bet he brought the film in on time and under budget. Post-Apocalyptic movies like The Road Warrior
succeeded primarily because they reinvented the Western with
a great deal Which leaves us little to look forward to except the special effects. The effects in Damnation Alley are pretty good, especially the sky effects, accomplished without any sort of digital jiggery-pokery. The rest of the money shots, however, are nothing you haven't already seen in a Bert I. Gordon movie, and used in the service of a better story, to boot.
RATING:
Cool ride, though. - April 15, 2000 |
|||
![]() |