At the beginning of the movie military personnel witness complete thermonuclear
war from an underground military bunker. Two years later the world is completely
fucked. An explosion in the base causes the four remaining soldiers to
leave the base in their two gigantic 12-wheeled armored vehicles. They head out
for a cross-country trip to Albany, where they've heard some recorded radio
broadcasts.Naturally, along the way they run into various bad guys and mutated creatures, but not as many as you'd expect. In fact the majority of the movie is pretty boring with just a lot of talking between the two leads: Jan-Michael Vincent and George Peppard (who has a terrible Southern accent).
The most fascinating thing to me about DAMNATION ALLEY is not really the movie itself (it's about as exciting as a lame episode of a sci-fi TV show), but the story behind the movie. I would love to see a well-researched documentary about the behind-the-scenes making and financing of this movie. According to IMDb and Wikipedia, the budget for this film was $17M, which in 1976 (when it was made) was a sizable budget. The makers, 20th Century Fox, where also releasing one other science fiction film that year, but they didn't have as much confidence in it and only spent $11M (originally $8.25M but it increased due to delays) on it. That film was fucking STAR WARS. When you watch STAR WARS the story is impressive and it looks great, so what happened on the set of DAMNATION ALLEY to make it look like hammered goat shit?! It boggles the mind.
Worth checking out, but it's nothing special. I remember seeing it on TV when I was a kid and the armor-plated flesh-eating cockroaches scared the shit out of me. Watching it now thought it looks hilarious and you can even see the strings pulling the roach horde.
