Jack Smight must have been distressed at getting such cheesy directorial assignments such as "Airport 1975" and, a few years later, this weak science-fiction entry. Once a solid TV director with a few interesting feature films to his credit, Smight's resume tailed off in the 1970s with lame titles such as "Damnation Alley", a second-feature if there ever was one. Survivors of the nuclear holocaust roam the desolate wasteland in a futuristic van, searching for others. Nice to know in the future we'll still have second-rate casinos in this country, equipped with slot-machines circa 1977. One revolting sequence involving blood-sucking cockroaches might have become a classic among splatter aficionados had the special effects budget been larger (when the roaches, en masse, chase Jan-Michael Vincent on his cycle, it looks like a carpet being pulled along by a wire). The cast of actors, George Peppard and Jackie Earle Haley among them, do OK work in an obviously inferior product. *1/2 from ****
Review of Damnation Alley
