Star Wars
Damnation Alley
Looking back over some of my other reviews, it becomes quite clear what sort of things I appreciate in a film; before even troubling myself with something as trivial as the plot, I’ve enthused about Christopher Lee, Ennio Morricone, killer shrews, alien monsters, robots, the undead etc, etc. So, if you were to pitch a film as being a post-apocalyptic adventure with giant scorpions and flesh eating cockroaches, do you really think I could turn it down?
Of course not.
I think I must be one of the few people who likes this kind of thing that hadn’t seen this film before. It has a great following of lovers (and haters) all over the internet - despite having never been released on DVD. Though Anchor Bay did try a few years back, Fox are sitting tight on the rights for the moment.
Whilst in previous posts, I’ve praised some low budget flicks - Murder Party for instance - for knowing their limits and keeping their ambition firmly within the realms of possibility (both financial and artistic), Damnation Alley is decidedly at the opposite end of the scale. Let’s be totally clear about this: Damnation Alley had a relatively enormous budget, set it’s ambitions massively high and er… failed on an epic level.
Nowadays, with CGI (of variable quality) and all sorts of clever trickery, I’m sure the task of creating giant 8ft-long scorpions would not be so difficult but the 70s were a very different world. Wikipedia claims that this was originally attempted using full size remote-control scorpions but then abandoned due to poor results. I would love to own an 8ft long remote controlled scorpion! If anyone out there knows where one can be found, please do let me know.
Eventually they created some kind of savage montage attempt, putting really close up scorpions in the same screen as some further away action. Although it is thoroughly unconvincing, it’s so thoroughly bonkers that you really do have to admire it.
Similarly unconvincingly threatening are the flesh eating cockroaches. Though they do have an awful lot of them, they are not really any bigger or scarier than normal cockroaches which, although a little frightening, tend not to be life-threatening. These ones, however, can strip flesh clean to the bone. And do.
Also of note, whilst we’re looking at the special effects are the brilliant skies. This film was released in the same year as Star Wars, with Fox originally seeing Star Wars as the underdog to this, their major Sci-fi film for the year. Years later when we compare the two, the effects in Star Wars - though decidedly ropey in places - make the er… green and red skies of Damnation Alley seem laughable, but somehow charming.
Is there anything I missed? Oh yeah, plot. And one other vitally important feature but we’ll come to that last.
The plot is decidedly so-so. It’s based on a book by Roger Zelazny. I haven’t read his book so can’t really say how true the plot is to the novel but, from the well-documented fact that he hated the film, I imagine it was somewhat dumbed down. It’s fairly standard post-apocalyptic fare: World gets nuked, loads of people die, earth turns on axis, USA becomes a desert, select band of survivors set out together and are confronted by aforementioned special-effects. The characters are two dimensional and uninteresting but… there’re flesh eating cockroaches dammit! Who needs a plot?
Finally we arrive at the one massively ambitious creation that was a total success; so much so that it has inspired its very own cult following. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, The Landmaster.
I’m sure that it would stand out entirely on it’s own merit, but the dodgy effects elsewhere in the film make this purpose-built, fully-functional armoured personnel carrier seem truly phenomenal. To be quite honest, if they’d edited out all the dialouge and just shown non-stop footage of the bendy-middled, heavily armed twelve-wheeled behemoth I’d probably have enjoyed the film even more than I did. It’s utterly fantastic and the fact it was designed and built for the film (at a cost equivalent today to $1,200,000) only makes me love it more.
This film will not challenge your brain. But if it doesn’t at least make you smile, I’d be very surprised indeed.
[Pictures are obviously low quality without it having ever been released on DVD. I also couldn’t find a trailer, but I do believe that the whole thing is on YouTube ]
Deathsport
Right, let’s start with what I knew about this film before I started. It stars (the late, great) David Carradine. It’s called Deathsport. If that wasn’t enough to make me want to watch, what more could I want? Could I cross my fingers and hope that, on top of those two, pretty convincing selling points, that it was produced by Roger Corman and set in a semi-medieval dystopian future? If I had done, I would’ve been in luck.
The film is also brilliant. Brilliant in the way that only a really crappy film made in 1978 can be. Brilliant in the way that most people fail to notice how brilliant it is and dismiss it as rubbish (2.7/10 rating on imdb? How are people SO dumb?). Brilliant in the way that only a film featuring David Carradine, wielding a perspex sword and battling motorcycle-mounted baddies can be.
From the off, you know you’re in for a treat. A narrated intro kindly informs us that, since the neutron wars (!), people only live in the cities, leaving the wild and barren countryside (think Star Wars’ Tatooine with a few more bushes) to the “dreaded mutant cannibals” (more on them later) and the Range-Guides. These folk are basically wandering Jedi-cum-gypsies, ultra-talented warrior nomads. Peaceful when left alone but capable of fighting when necessary.
Mr Carradine in his prison cell.
Sadly, bonkers Lord Zirpola of the city, has decided, in an effort to increase the popularity of his war, to design a new fighting machine and perform a public demonstration of it with a handful of captured Range-Guides as victims. This is where DeathSport comes in: DeathSport has replaced the death penalty for the statesmen of the city, instead of going to prison, criminals fight for their freedom a la Roman gladiators. For a special edition of his DeathSport however, Lord Zirpola has given all of his criminals one of his new DeathMachines with which to attack and kill the captured Range-Guides (Carradine and Claudia Jennings).
The DeathMachines are motorbikes. They’re motorbikes. Nothing particularly fancy, just motorbikes.
Carradine and Claudia Jennings plan their next move
AIEEEE! DEATH MACHINES! … Or motorbikes as they’re more commonly known.
Needless to say, Carradine and Jennings, as ultra-warriors with their perspex swords (basically low-rent lightsabres…) are pretty nifty and don’t fall victim to the er…. DeathMachine motorbikes, nick a couple and ride away…
And here’s where the problem comes. The best action scene, the DeathSport of the title, is all over and done with just 40 minutes through the 82min run time. What feels like something of a climactic battle comes just half-way through. What follows is a long sections of really very dull motorbike journeys through open scrub land, the occasional fight but almost no interesting action, almost no dialogue and almost no fun.
It hots up again towards the end, with some wonderful pyrotechnics, a little action with the dreaded cannibal mutants (Tusken Raiders from Star Wars?) and a fantastic perspex-sword battle, but the middle section is just too boring. It’s almost as if they simply couldn’t face releasing a 55 minute long film (the good bits) and just whacked in 25 minutes of solid plot-less boredom. Which is a great shame really, as it spoils an otherwise pretty damn good film.
In all, it’s good fun. Maybe watch the first 45 minutes, then go get a drink and some snacks and be ready to settle down for the last bit? It plays as a kind of meeting point of Death Racers and Star Wars and finally answers the question that has been on everyone’s lips: What would StarWars have been like if David Carradine had got Mark Hamill’s role and George Lucas had been born as Roger Corman?
The answer is DeathSport.
