Main      Site Guide    

It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie

Reader Review


Damnation Alley

Posted by: AJ
Date Submitted: Thursday, June 10, 1999 at 10:55:21
Date Posted: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 at 03:58:34

This movie is a bad post-nuclear war flick from 1977. Its actors are forgettable -- I can't even remember the characters' names.

The movie starts at some sort of military base, where people have somehow managed to survive the nuclear blast and the radiation. How they do this is beyond me, because they are neither above it nor below it; their base is on perfectly level ground. Oh yeah, this comes up in the movie later: the sky is all sorts of weird colors. Evidently the nuclear blast has messed up the entire universe, because the people have no trouble breathing in this new, radioactive atmosphere. Anyway.

Sidekick is painting the side of his house (???) when MainMale comes riding up on his motorcycle. Good thing he doesn't run out of gas and his bike isn't radioactive, huh? MainMale throws a dummy to some giant scorpions, then rides around them -- which he could and should have done in the first place -- to get to his house.

Now we go to the military base, which is about 100 yards away from MainMale and Sidekick's house. The military base turns out to double as a gas storage place, with running pumps and electricity. They somehow have the electric energy to keep the lights going, as well as the air filtration systems that they apparently need. NamelessCharacter1, from inside the base, punches his code into the electronic keypad and enters the room. NamelessCharacter2 yells at NamelessCharacter1 for being twenty minutes late and leaves. NamelessCharacter1 lights a cigarette, reads a Playboy, and falls asleep on the bed that happens to be in the room...with his cigarette still burning.

Ok, wait a minute here. There are quite a few things wrong with this scene. Why in the world is the guy lighting a cigarette in a room which, we find out later, is in a gigantic gas storage complex? Don't you think that the guy would have a little common sense? Also, what are they running their electric stuff on? Last I checked, burning gas does not give you electricity. I know that I'd mentioned this before, but it keeps coming up in the movie. I found it incredibly annoying.

On with the scene. NamelessCharacter1's cigarette catches his Playboy on fire, and the whole storage plant blows. The blow evidently does not damage the garage, though. Lieutenant Something comes out in the funniest looking tank I've ever seen. It has three wheels on a triangle-type thing so that it can go over rocks more easily. Good idea, but the way the triangle-thingy is, there is no way that the triangle could turn over if the tank encountered a rock. It gets much better, though. The middle of the tank is made of cloth. What, you've never heard that cloth is fire resistant and as strong as steel? Well, these people evidently have. I would have laughed at this, but the movie was sooo boring.

I can't cover more than the first ten minutes of this movie, as it is so incredibly boring I've forgotten lots of it, and it would take far too long for me to write down everything that was wrong -- especially since, thankfully, I've forgotten half of the movie. I'd guess this could be funny if you were watching with a group of friends.

Scenes to watch for: Sidekick gets eaten by the killer roaches.

Best line: "He ain't doin' somethin' we're all not gonna to be doin', he's just doin' it in the wrong order."

Thing that make you go "Huh?": Why the sky is all multi-colored. (This is actually explained in the movie, but the explanation -- that the nuclear blast knocked the earth off its axis -- makes no sense. Also, if that had happened, wouldn't people start freezing and the ice caps melt?)


Back to the It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie home page.