Movies I Stayed up Late For: Damnation Alley

 I remember reading an article at one point that in 1977, Fox Studios was going to lean on Damnation Alley, a science fiction film based on a novel by Roger Zelazny, as a tent-pole film.  The article is a good piece of reading, check it out by clicking here:

In my mid-teens, the flick was being broadcast late at night, which is probably where it belonged.  I remember being horrified by the opening 17 minutes which depicts a nuclear war from the point of view of underground missile silo operators and sundry other military personnel.  We get George Peppard, Jan Michael Vincent, Paul Winfield, and a dead-silent Murray Hamilton who was probably thinking Jaws felt a hell of a lot more than two years prior at that point.  Also, after the apocalypse fades, we get to enjoy the company of Jackie Earle Haley, hot off of his role as Chico Bail Bonds' slugging center fielder, Kelly Leak, in the previous year's Bad News Bears.  Long before his brilliant turn as Rorschach in Watchmen.

Anyway, at the age of my viewing, nuclear war was my biggest fear.  You can tell that from my own words here: Fear of the atom

Damnation Alley ended up looking as terrible as it did because, according to that article, Fox kept siphoning budget money to shine up its other 1977 release.  That flick being one you may be familiar with:  Star Wars.   It was ridiculous how antiseptically clean the military facility and its technology looked, just to then be juxtaposed with a filthy desert wasteland after World War III.  I guess we all know where the money went.  

Cut.  Everybody load up for New Mexico!

As I was reading the piece, I kept wondering who in the hell running the studio was thinking that this movie, (and don't get me wrong, if executed properly it could have been better than B movie trash) with its dead-serious and uber-dark opening sequence could have been the centerpiece of a studio's release line-up.  The events opening the film are far scarier than Darth Vader could ever be, (even when executing Order 66 which came years later in a prequel).

It would have sent me running up the damn aisle!!  The End of the World as a plot device for one of a studio's main pieces of profit-searching?  That's some poor judgment.  I wonder if the choice for greenlighting this was made by the same cat that gave the thumbs-up to Star Wars?

Another question, here: Ya gotta wonder who the target audience would have been for this film at full budget.  No one, (at least I hope not) took their kids to see stuff like this in 1977.  Hard to imagine Burger King cups with the cast of Damnation Alley on them.

When I finished watching the film (which got progressively worse) I went to bed that night thinking that it was just another Roger Corman-type dart at the wall; it was that bad.  

I had no idea!