Damnation Alley: I love it when an apocalypse comes together
In the Dark Ages before home video (that'd be the seventies and early eighties, pilgrims) the most potent schlock cinema infusion around came from my local movie theaters. As a kid I learned quickly that the neighborhood screens formed a decided pecking order--sort of a hierarchy of crap. This gave you a gauge as to just how crappy a movie would be before you saw it. The chain theaters (which included the embryonic beginnings of the multiplexes) pumped out the obligatory ration of mainstream product, with occasional flashes of sci-fi, horror or exploitation weirdness surfacing if a chain programmer saw some serious profit potential from a particular film ( Halloween and Porky's , for example, both made the leap straight into nice theaters throughout the greater Northwest despite their bargain-basement pedigrees). Then Tacoma's Starlite Drive-In and the much-celebrated ( in this Blog , at least) Parkland Theater peddled more consistently exploitive and crappy wares, usuall...