SAN QUENTIN (1937)

Good cast, but the story is as weak as a one-legged kitten with feline polio. The prisoners at San Quentin have been getting kinda rowdy lately so the state calls in a military man (Pat O'Brien) to take over the prison and whip the men into shape. As movie fate would have it, the night before he starts the job, O'Brien meets nightclub singer, Ann Sheridan, and instantly falls in love with her. As he's putting the moves on her, her younger brother (played by Humphrey Bogart who was 11 years older than Sheridan in real life) shows up with the coppers hot on his tail. He's arrested for robbery. And I'm sure you can guess what prison he's going to...that's right wise guy: San Quentin.

On his first day in the joint, Bogart gets into a fight, but tough loving O'Brien makes it a point to reform Bogart with a kind but firm hand. Pulling Bogart in the opposite direction, is a fellow prisoner who wants Bogart to take part in an escape.

With a runtime of only 70 minutes (!!!), you never get a chance to get bored, but the characters are two-dimensional as fuck and the story completely uninspired. In most of his movies Bogart commands your attention, but here he was completely miscast.  People constantly talked about him like he was a child, but in real life he was 38 years old and looked it! At one point somebody mentioned his character was 25!

Very little action, a completely miscast Humphrey Bogart, unoriginal story, Ann Sheridan's hair was too short. Skip it. If you need me I'll be in my room watching I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG.

Shadow of cameraman.

DAMNATION ALLEY (1977)

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.