Damnation Alley (film)

Damnation Alley is a 1977 postapocalyptic film, directed by Jack Smight, loosely based on the novel of the same name by Roger Zelazny. The original music score was composed by Jerry Goldsmith and the notable cinematography was by Harry Stradling Jr.

Two years later, the Earth has been tilted off its axis by nuclear detonations of World War III radiation has mutated insect life, the planet is wracked by massive storms, and the sky is in a perpetual aurora borealislike state. Tanner has resigned his commission and has been scouting Barstow while Keegan, who has also left the Air Force, has been painting as an artist in one of the bases outbuildings. Mutated giant scorpions menace the area. Later an airman falls asleep in a bunk and drops a lit cigarette onto a pile of Playboy magazines, which causes the entire base to catch fire and explode, killing most of its inhabitants including the base commander, General Lander Murray Hamilton. Keegan and Tanner are unscathed, as are Denton and Lieutenant Tom Perry Kip Niven, who were in an underground garage bunker.Denton has been considering going to Albany, New York to find the source of a lone radio transmission. He and the remaining others set out in two Air Force Landmasters, giant 12wheeled armored personnel carriers capable of climbing 60degree inclines and operating in water. They must cross Damnation Alley, considered the path of least resistance between intense radiation areas thus named by Denton. Along their journey one of the Landmasters becomes disabled in a storm which also kills Perry and they encounter mutated flesh stripping cockroaches in the ruins of Salt Lake City which eat Keegan alive. Denton and Tanner also pick up two survivors a woman in Las Vegas, Janice Dominique Sanda, and a teenage boy, Billy Jackie Earle Haley, discovered in an abandoned house. Later they fight off a band of crazed guntoting mountain men they encounter in the ruins of a gas station. Denton uses a rocket launcher to destroy the gas station. ........

Source: Wikipedia