Filmdoom: Damnation Alley (1977)

[this review contains various spoilers.]

The Plot: Nuclear apocalypse! Mutant bugs! Supervan! Hot foreign lady! Radioactive rednecks! Hannibal Smith! Airwolf! Teen Rorschach!

The Good: Hannibal Smith stole Dabney Coleman's moustache.


Somewhere during the summer of '77, MacGyver, Patrick Swayze and various other soon-to-be-kickass people were sitting in movie theatres watching Damnation Alley and saying to themselves, "Whoa. That guy's hairdo fucking rules!"


After the apocalypse, Airwolf tears around the nuclear wasteland on his kickass dirtbike avoiding hordes of giant scorpions! In a completely pointless action sequence with really shitty special effects!! But it's still pretty awesome!


One word. Supervan. It's got triplewheels and missile launchers and all kinds of ultracool stuff all over it. Somewhere in 1977, Megaforce was looking at the Supervan and thinking, "Missiles on a van?! Holy shit, that's a great idea!"


That guy from Wrath of Khan who shoots himself instead of Captain Kirk totally got eaten by armored, flesh-eating cockroaches! He should have known it was going to happen. He was the black guy, he was slightly injured and Airwolf had just picked up a superhot french chick. Chances of surviving this scene: zero.


After Wrath of Khan suicide guy gets the shit eaten out of him, Airwolf and superhot french chick totally jumped his dirtbike out a department store window! I wish I had a screenshot. Luckily, I have something better than a screenshot. MSpaint!


That's just a sampling of all the awesome things that happen in his movie. Later, Airwolf stands with his upper body sticking out of Supervan while Teen Rorschach keeps hitting him with rocks. Then they meet up with radioactive hillbillies that want to make sweet, sweet love with superhot french chick and Teen Rorschach wins by hitting someone with a rock. Is there any problem throwing a rock can't solve? I doubt it. The sky is always filled with crazy laser effects, there's tornados, a huge pointless flood straight out of the bible, shit explodes all over the place, a hillbilly gets missiled to death. It's almost non-stop awesome.


The Bland: In the opening sequence, Airwolf and Hannibal Smith are working in a nuclear missile silo. Hannibal has just decided he doesn't want to hang out in the missile silo with Airwolf because he's a hippie, when suddenly World War 3 erupts! They calmly go through the launch procedure and fire off their nukes. Then they walk calmly out into the mini NORAD-style control room filled with military types calmly doing their jobs and Airwolf calmly leans up against a wall and calmly lights a cigarette and calmly watches the end of the world on the satellite screen. Calmly. Seriously, they look like they don't know the cameras are running and they're waiting for the next scene to start. I know they're supposed to be professional military types and all, but you'd think one or two people would at least kinda shake their head and say, "Well, that fucking sucks."



After that scene, it's four years later or something. The screenwriter had to have some way of killing off most of the surviving army guys so our heroes could go on a road trip. So what did they come up with? Apparently they have a special room in their bunker whose sole purpose is to house gigantic gas tanks which leak copious amounts of fumes. And for some reason this same gas-filled room of death needs a guard and contains a comfy bunkbed. So the guard yanks it to a huge stack of porno magazines and passes out with a cigarette in his hand. I guess the gas can't be ignited by a cigarette, but it can be ignited by a burning porno mag. Kaboom. Nice explosion, but the set-up was about as believable and simple as a Final Destination death scene.


The special effects are pretty pathetic. As cool as the wacky lasery sky is, it's basically just a really lazy and poorly thought out green screen effect, which half the time bleeds into vehicles and characters in the foreground. Same thing with the scorpions. They were filmed walking around on a green screen (actually, a blue screen. Back then they were blue.) and just thrown onto the other footage without much thought. When they first showed them, there was no other reference on the screen, so from the way the were initially shot (from below), I thought they were supposed to be as big as the sandworms from Dune, then I thought they were as big as houses, then Airwolf drove by in his motorcycle and they were only as big as cows. Scorpions Of Unusual Size are kickass no matter what, but I like a little more consistency in my shitty effects.


Near the end, there's a giant flood for no reason. It just happens. No rain. The guys are in a junkyard fixing Supervan and then pow, biblical flood. The only purpose for the flood is that the movie was almost over and they needed to get the Supervan to its destination (Albany for whatever reason), but they had to figure out how to get them from the shitty desert they'd been in the whole movie to a somehow as-yet-untouched-by-nuclear-apocalypse green foresty area. It was really lazy and pointless. I appreciated that they didn't want to show another desert driving montage, but a magical Land of the Lost white water ride transition from desert to Albany in two minutes is just goofy.



The Ugly: I don't know if they ran out of money, ideas, drugs or motivation, but at the end of the movie, the movie just... ended. After all the awesome shit these people went through, the flood drops them off in beautiful, green, laserless blue sky Albany and they talk to some lady on their radio. Then Airwolf jumps on his dirtbike, drives a few miles down the road to a perfect, undestroyed-by-nuclear-missiles-or-raditation cluster of fucking farms, complete with white picket fences and a crowd of well dressed, non-mutant townsfolk, who run up to him and shake his hand and THE CREDITS ROLL. THE END, SUCKER. It's like being in the middle of an awesome handjob and then your girlfriend lets out a big fart, gets up and leaves and you never see her again. It's exactly like that.