Really Awful Movies

In 1977, 20th Century Fox had two sci-fi films on their docket: Damnation Alley and Star Wars. They had high hopes for Damnation Alley and expected it to outperform that silly Lucas-helmed space opera. Oh well…best laid plans and all.

Damnation Alley is one of those awful yet endearing, clunky yet charming films we love. It stars Jan-Michael Vincent and not the drug-addled, slurring mess from Alienator and Hit List. This is the young, charismatic JMV from the Bronson classic The Mechanic. It also stars a mustachioed George Peppard, Hannibal himself from The A-Team, chomping on a cigar but also delivering his lines in an overwrought Southern accent (“Kill-ah Cock-a-roach-ez”). Other actors of note include the great Paul Winfield and a young Jackie Earle Haley, one year removed from his breakout role in The Bad News Bears.

Vincent and Peppard play Air Force recruits Tanner and Denton. Denton (Peppard) is the grizzled, by-the-book veteran, and Tanner (Vincent) is the young, brash hotshot. And of course, Denton just does not like Tanner’s ways. But when shit hits the fan and World War Three breaks out, Tanner and Denton have to work together to launch retaliatory missiles.

The opening scene on the Air Force base is so matter of fact, it’s hilarious. It’s the end of the world and no seems too concerned. There’s no wailing, crying, gnashing of teeth, trying to connect with loved ones. It’s just missiles are launched…let’s intercept them plus retaliate…oops we only intercepted 40%…major population centers hit nationwide….damn, that’s a bad day at the office!

Moving forward presumably a couple of years, and a crawl indicates that the “planet [is] shrouded in a pall of radioactive dust…in a climate gone insane.” And yet the survivors are able to venture out without a care in the world. JMV’s character is tooling around in a motorcycle and Paul Winfield’s character is painting a mural for heaven’s sake. So much for fallout or continued effects of radiation damage.

If humans aren’t affected, scorpions certainly are. As JMV tools around the dessert landscape on his bike, he navigates through a number of giant mutated scorpions that look like they were plucked straight out of an AIP film – not a lick convincing. Tanner and Winfield’s Keegan have quit the Air Force but hang around the base drinking. Luckily, the base is stocked with a plethora of booze, which is very, very good. Unfortunately, an errant cigarette from another recruit causes a massive explosion and it’s bye-bye to the base.

The only four survivors are Keegan, Denton, Tanner and another non-descript character. A garage door opens and out rolls two Landmasters – massive, armed vehicles that resemble fortified RVs. Each Landmaster has a state-of-the art guidance system that looks like an old, clunky Texas Instruments calculator. The resemblance is not that uncanny as that’s what they actually are! Kudos to the prop master for that one. Denton gets the idea to head to Albany because…well…just because. Road trip!

Along the way, they make various stops, lose some members of their party, and pick up others. One town is infested with armored killer cockroaches which eat poor Paul Winfield alive. They also encounter lots of environmental threats such as hurricanes and storms.

Will our intrepid travelers make it to the promised land of Albany and live happily ever after? Without verging into spoiler territory, let’s just say the ending is a little too pat and Norman Rockwelly for our tastes. Nonetheless, the Landmaster is an incredibly cool vehicle and Damnation Alley is the type of clunky, goofy sci-fi film – with little care about the science and lots of focus on the fiction – that major studios just don’t make anymore. After Star Wars, audiences would never accept a film like Damnation Alley ever again, but then again, they didn’t really accept Damnation Alley either.

*** (out of five)

When a shark plummets to earth, landing in President Lincoln’s sculpted lap, you can’t help but wonder if The Great Emancipator could’ve saved us from this as well.

So too, should Sharknado 3 be memorialized. It really is one for the ages, a cynical waterlogged stinker.

On this site, we’ve reveled in bad cinema. We’ve been charmed by Manos: The Hands of Fate. We’ve been oddly fascinated by John Travolta’s edifying spiels about “leverage” in Battlefield Earth, a film we’ve been both defended, even if our arguments aren’t buttressed with anything you might call solid facts. (As Mark Twain said, it’s important to get your facts straight so you can distort them as you please).

But make no mistake about it; the facts are that Sharknado 3 is an abomination.

Ian Ziering is Fin again, our indefatigable weather systems Paul Revere, warning the masses about the pitiless portmanteau that is sharks and tornadoes. He furrows his brow mostly, exhibiting none of the natural charm he oozed on 90201.

If you’ve ever wanted to see libertarian pundit Ann Coulter catch a wave atop a makeshift surfboard portrait of George Washington, you’re Ann Coulter. Or Thunder Levin. That’s the actual name (or the nom de plume) attached to this script. The late boxer Arturo “Thunder” Gotti earned that moniker, providing the sweet science with some of most thrilling fights in a generation. Someone should’ve thrown in the towel in this installment of Sharknado, as dull and devoid of interest as any film that’s ever been made.

It’s an amazing accomplishment that for a movie which went to great lengths to insert cameos of anyone who’s ever skirted along the margins of show business success — that none of these should produce even the tiniest, most fleeting speck of inspiration.

In the spirit of the lazy tenor that produced Sharknado 3, this reviewer is avoiding IMDb cast listings and operating solely from memory re: those cameos: There’s Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban, who, had he been pitched this as a venture capital play would’ve sent Sharknado’s producers away empty handed. He plays POTUS and offers Obama bromides about “beacons of hope.” Abandon all of it ye who enter here.

WWE wrestler Chris Jericho runs an amusement park ride. A send-up of the carnival world he occupied in tights? No, no reference made. He’s just there to be there even if he’s the gold standard of silver-tongued charmers at his day job. Few wrestlers apart from The Rock are as charming on the mic working a crowd. Jericho utters about three sentences here, one of which is calling out to someone who’s lost their cellphone.

The cast of The Today Show is eaten by sharks, perhaps a protracted metaphor for the obsolescence of morning television in the age of the web. In a baffling bit of casting, there’s two blink-and-you’ll-miss-him (a temporal approximation of his staying power, pop culturally speaking) of the human straight-man, disgraced congressman/pun meme Anthony Weiner.

Add to that the co-founder of reddit, Alexis Ohanian (why?). There’s Lou Ferigno, as a charming think tank lobbyist (just kidding, hired muscle), Kathie Lee Gifford and whoever that is who drinks wine with her, the Sugar Ray singer guy, and the ubiquitous Hoff, the quintessence of cheese, who’s a NASA bigwig who seems bored here. As well he should.

There’s a long tradition of disaster movies featuring alphabet-defying celebrities and D-listers making a living running away from building fires, floods, and avalanches. This peaked in the 70s with the likes of Airport, The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure — you could go on.

What separates Sharknado is its utter dourness, joylessness, cynicism, poor cinematography, lazy performances, and poor script. It looks and feels awful in every frame. It’s quite simply unbearable. We reluctantly grant it one star for some inspired opening credits and 30-seconds of amusement park-related sharky fun.

When principals hoist an Iwo Jima flag for a shark shish kabob, or one character claims they’ve experienced “PTSD: post traumatic shark disorder,” part of you dies inside. There are some species of shark that must swim constantly to process oxygen over their gills, or they’ll expire. Please stop swimming (and flying) Sharknado.

* (out of 5)

[Please see our list of the WORST HORROR FILMS OF 2015]