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A long time ago, a film studio far, far away put its faith in a big budget science fiction film in a time of chaos in the industry. It wasn't their only sci-fi film - they had another one with a lower budget going through a troubled production at the same time - but for a while some execs thought that Damnation Alley, their biggest release of the year, would be a big enough hit to cover their losses... The result was probably the most expensive B-movie ever made, costing more than films like The Spy Who Loved Me or The Towering Inferno despite not offering much more than George Peppard and Jan-Michael Vincent driving an RV through the desert for 90 minutes `under skies lurid and angry, in a climate gone insane.' A huge box-office flop, it ended up on a double-bill with Ralph Bakshi's Wizards in the US and with David Carradine quickie Thunder and Lightning in Europe, the success of Star Wars allowing its failure to go largely unnoticed.
It had pedigree: Jack Smight may not be a name many remember now but he was a solid hitmaker with films like Winning, Midway, Harper and Airport 1975 under his belt, the self-destructive Jan-Michael Vincent was still being pushed as the next big thing (and was considerably cheaper than the $2m Steve McQueen wanted to do the film), Jerry Goldsmith provided the score and in Alan Sharp and Lukas Heller it had two excellent screenwriters. Roger Zelazny's novel had cult status and the pitch of doing a kind of post-apocalyptic Easy Rider-cum-Wages of Fear was the kind of logline that green lights are made of. Unfortunately virtually nobody involved in the film seemed to bother reading it, the plot - a killer being offered a pardon to take a suicide mission delivering vaccine across a devastated landscape - reworked as a quartet of Air Force officers who pushed the buttons during WW3 taking a couple of armoured vehicles to Albany to see if a recorded radio signal means there are any survivors there. Along the way they pick up Dominique Sanda (quite astonishingly awful in her English-language debut) and Jackie Earl Haley, encounter giant scorpions, storms, armour-plated killer cockroaches and Robert Donnor's inbred mountain man and the touring company of Deliverance before the film just filters out without ever coming up with a real ending. There's not much dramatic conflict or character along the way either, much of it hitting the cutting room floor as the penny finally dropped with the Fox execs that they had a turkey on their hands, leading them to shelve and heavily re-edit it, expensively adding some psychedelic sky effects to try to make it look a bit more visually impressive. It didn't work.
It's the kind of film that may have cost a then staggering $17m but looks like a $1.5m AIP exploitation flick. It's certainly hard to see where the money went, especially when one big explosive setpiece is stock footage from George Peppard's earlier Operation Crossbow. The special features on Shout Factory's US DVD and Region A-locked Blu-ray offer some explanation: the inexperienced producers made plenty of mistakes, the chief of which seems to be not waiting the two years original effects man Douglas Trumbull thought the film needed and going through a process of trial and error - mostly error - with less talented replacements. Animatronic scorpions that didn't work were replaced with real life ones not terribly well matted onto real backgrounds, cockroaches were a mixture of the real thing and models pulled on strings and, while the sky effects are pleasingly like a chroma key 70s album cover, they're often so poorly composited with the blue screen actors that they look like something from a cash strapped 70s episode of Doctor Who. The most bizarre effect, however, sees a very obviously live actress doubling for a tailor's dummy in one motorcycle stunt, which at least is a reversal of the norm. At it's best it looks like a cheesier version of an old Lost in Space episode, but it's a flat and uninspired affair, mechanically moving from plot point A to plot point B with workmanlike lack of zest or originality, nothing much happening along the way to its anticlimax. It doesn't even manage to summon up any urgency or drama to its opening scenes of Armageddon. It's just about watchable, but that's not much of a recommendation.
While the UK DVD is extras free, Shout's US version and Region A-locked Blu-ray has a decent extras package: audio commentary from co-producer Paul Maslansky, whose experience on the much more enjoyable Race With the Devil led to the studio calling him in to see the film through production when it became clear the original producers were better at packaging the film than the day-to-day practicalities, trailer, TV spot and a trio of interviews with co-writer Alan Sharp (who is open about it not being up to his usual standards and about the film's dramatic shortcomings), co-producer Jerome Zeitman (who fesses up to his inexperience and the many production problems) and Dean Jeffries, who designed the Landmaster vehicle that made more of an impression than any of the characters (and which I used to pass regularly on my way to work when it was parked in his LA workshop in the 90s). Although the US TV broadcasts included some deleted scenes to pad out the running time, none of these have been included.
