Reel Science: Damnation Alley
It’s survival-by-billing when the above-the-line talent (George Peppard, Paul Winfield, and a pristine Jan-Michael Vincent) weather a post-credits throng of mushroom clouds only to spend the rest of the picture barrelling cross-country in a giant, articulated, twelve-wheeled Landcruiser en route to Albany in search of a lone voice on the radio. Two of the costly vehicles ($300,000 in 1976) appear on screen, but only one was commissioned for the picture. Directed by action-stalwart Jack Smight (No Way to Treat a Lady, Airport 75), this hit screens a few months after Star Wars, towards the tail-end of the 70s post-apocalyptic cycle (Soylent Green, A Boy and His Dog, Logan’s Run, etc.). The sanguine sci-fi adventure owes more to 50s-style trick-photography — scorpions bigger than a Bugatti — than it does industrially-lit midgets in garbage cans positioned before green-screens and brandishing lightsabers. And smoke ‘em if you got ‘em: the air above may be a putrid, unbreathable shade of Emerald City Green, but it’s reassuring to discover that a pack of butts can survive a nuclear holocaust. That’s one possible topic for discussion when Dr. Michael Wall, Vice President of Science and Conservation and Curator of Entomology for The Nat, hosts a post-show Q&A.