Reply With QuoteJEH also plays the filthy hippy in...that Basketball movie with Will Ferrell that's name is escaping me right now.
So I'm looking up that awesome truck from Damnation Alley which used to be parked off the 101 here in Los Angeles and I discover that Jackie Earle Haley was in the movie! You guys, of course, know him as Rorschach in The Watch Men, but art house fags like me know him as the awesome guy from Breaking Away who didn't re-emerge until Little Children. Cool! Time to re-watch Damnation Alley!
But, wait, it's not on Netflix? Maybe they misspelled it Damnation Ally? Nope. A quick IMDB check reveals it's not even on DVD! How's a brother supposed to watch a thirty-year-old cheesy post-apocalyptic Jan Michael Vincent movie? Come on!
-Tom
JEH also plays the filthy hippy in...that Basketball movie with Will Ferrell that's name is escaping me right now.
Semi-Pro. I didn't even have to look it up. And I don't like Jackie Earle Haley that much.
-Tom
Wait, Jackie Earle Haley was in Breaking Away? The movie about the bicycle racing kid who speaks in an Italian accent even though he's not Italian? I thought I was the only guy in the universe who either remembered or liked that movie.
A quick check to imdb reveals that he was Moocher. I had no idea.
As an aside, what the hell happened to Peter Yates? I just watched The Friends Of Eddie Coyle a couple of weeks ago, which I somehow had never seen before, and it struck me that Peter Yates might be the last unsung auteur of the 70s. Check it: Bullitt, Murphy's War, The Hot Rock, Mother Juggs & Speed, Breaking Away, Krull, The Dresser. Oh, and The Deep, which I think I saw when I was like eight years old at the drive-in but sadly remember absolutely nothing about.
As a child of the late 70s/early 80s, I love Breaking Away but I know Jackie Earle Haley primarily as the dirtbike riding pitcher from The Bad News Bears. I associate Breaking Away more with the main dude who occasionally appears in random crime drama TV shows, the guy who does the voice in The Wonder Years and that guy from Inner Space who used to bang up on Meg Ryan.
I also remember watching Damnation Alley on tv as a kid. I don't remember much about the plot other than it was post-apocalypse and had a big rig truck and also had some kind of creepy cockroach scene that I'm sure would look delightfully bad when viewed today.
Amazon VOD, that's how.Originally Posted by TomChick
Edit: you can apparently stream Amazon stuff from your PC to your 360 now. News to me :)
OMG, so awesome, Talisker. That trailer sealed the deal!
...wait, I have to actually *pay* to watch it? Screw that. I have Netflix so I can watch crappy movies for free!
God, I guess I'm going to have to rent the original Bad New Bears to get my early Jackie Earle Haley fix, aren't I? I wonder how that holds up.
Also, madkevin, how can you forget Jackie Earle Haley in Breaking Away? He's so awkward and ungainly looking in that movie. He has really bad acne and he's all scrawny. There's this great scene where he's lifting weights in his living room and you're like, "dude, give it up". He's also got the least goofy story arc, probably because it was the least developed.
And, wow, I never would have guessed Peter Yates did all those! I recently re-watched The Deep, in which an eel eats Louis Gosset Jr's head. But I was in it primarily for Jacqueline Bisset's breasts, which are featured very prominently in the opening scenes of the movie. If that didn't stick in your 8-year-old brain, madkevin, I can only surmise that you're totally a homo. Which is cool and all, but, dude, she was scuba diving in a see-through white T-shirt, for Pete's sake!
-Tom
While it's only four bucks, that's about three dollars more than I'd pay to watch something old and crappy on a whim.
Hopefully it'll make it over to Netflix's streaming before too long.
The main thing I remember about The Deep is being dragged to it as a pretty young kid and feeling ripped off because I was expecting something like Jaws. If I recall correctly, the poster was even slightly like Jaws' poster. But no, it was some weird movie about gold and pirates, and not the fun kind. But I am probably misremembering.
Speaking of fucked up movies about pirates, did anybody see The Island with Michael Caine? It was another movie with tits, so Tom probably caught it, but mainly what I remember was the dude being tortured with the toothpicks in the eyelids. That's the kind of thing that could give a hypothetical kid some serious nightmares.
But I did watch Damnation Alley not too long ago on Comcast's on demand thingy, and I'm sorry I did to be honest. Did not hold up, even with JMV and Hannibal and the dude who got parasites stuck in his head in Wrath of Khan. Though he is 2/2 for unpleasant death by freaky bugs, because those meat-eating cockroaches were intense, man. Wasn't he also chewed on by a racist dog in that movie about the white supremacist who trained his dog to hate black people? Maybe that was someone else.
Granted, I was pretty gay when I was 8. I really liked show tunes and I had a total obsession with Paul Lynde.* But in my defense, I think I am mistaking The Deep for Orca, which now that I think about it does sorta explain my crush on Charlotte Rampling.
* Peter Marshall: According to Tony Randall, "Every woman I've been intimate with in my life has been...” what?
Paul Lynde: Bitterly disappointed.
Damnation Alley wasn't a bad novel, anyway.... Pity the movie shared nothing in common with it except the hero was driving a truck.
Oh yeah, and: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw...+alley&x=0&y=0
Exactly. Kelly Leak. But Tanner > Kelly.
Pansy. I paid to see Damnation Alley in the theater when it was originally released.
In my head Damnation Alley is all mixed up with the old TV series Ark II. Since they both featured futuristic RVs in a post apocalyptic environment.
Bah, consider yourself lucky.
Until very recently, A Boy and His Dog wasn't available on DVD either. :P
Having watched "highlights" of it for free on youtube, it's really not worth 4 bucks. I can see why Zelazny asked to have his name removed from it.
For Tom, it does have one thing in common with Deus Ex, it features a character with an outrageously bad French accent.
I suppose fallout fans might get a couple of seconds of enjoyment from the rad scorpion sequence.
It's now available!?! Cool.
Damnation Alley is the worst "end of world" movie ever. It's not even fun-bad.
Also, Johnny Got His Gun is now on Netflix. Still a powerful movie.
I remember seeing Damnation Alley on TV as a kid but haven't seen it since. One nice angle at the time was that a small sequence of it was filmed near where I grew up in Montana.
Ha! I was describing the premise of the book (soon to be movie; complete with deus ex machina!) The Road to my cow orkers the other day and the subject turned to "end of the world movies". A Boy and His Dog was mentioned and I brought up Damnation Alley... to blank stares. Man, it had Jan Michael Vincent in it... where the hell were you in the 70s anyway?
Yeah, looking on Amazon.com (us site) there are apparently 5 versions of the movie, original (1999), re-release(2003),Tv widescreen (2008), remaster(2008) and an enhanced version (2008).
Think the one I got was one of the 1999 versions, which is discontinued.
Didn't Damnation Alley also have George Peppard?
I think I remember watching that and remember a scene where the sky was all roiling orange clouds?
I guess a token nod to the book, where there was a permanent radiation storm/hurricane or something like that a few hundred feet up, preventing planes from being used to transport the drugs, and motivating the truck. I think they didn't bother to mention it in the movie.
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