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While browsing Amazon for "Damnation Alley", the DVD wasn't available but the book by Roger Zelazny was.  Curious as to what the differences are between the two, I ordered the book.  The movie was released in 1977 about a group of military survivors traveling in armored vehicles through the nuclear wasteland of Midwest America (a.k.a. "Damnation Alley") to find an outpost of humanity.  The book was published in 1969 about an outlaw driver leading armored vehicles from Los Angeles to Boston through Damnation Alley to deliver anti-serum to save people from the plague.  Between the movie and the book, I would say it's a toss-up.  Both are bad science fiction in a good way but that's an acquired taste.

Hell Tanner, the seventh child in a family where his father only had one name for him, is a former Hell's Angel, a fast driving car thief, smuggler and cold-blooded killer.  Captured by the legal authority of the Nation of California, he's given a deal: rot in jail for the rest of his life or lead a convoy through Damnation Alley to deliver anti-serum for a full pardon.  Prizing his freedom and an opportunity to escape later, he agrees to what is considered to be a suicide mission.  Only one person from the Boston convoy made it to Los Angeles to deliver the request for help and died shortly thereafter.

The American East and West coasts survived the fallout from a three-day nuclear exchange between the global superpowers, and police states been set up in the isolated communities.  We later find out near the end of the story that the timeline is set in the far future where colonies been established on the Moon, Mars and Titan (a Saturn moon) before everything went kablooey.  The extreme environmental damage of the fallout caused world-wide atmospheric storms that prevented communication by radio or flying aircrafts at higher attitudes.  The Midwest became Damnation Alley as hot spots of detonated nuclear warheads are still highly radioactive years later, the landscape altered beyond recognition, and harmless animals are giant monsters.

The journey begins with Tanner brutally beating up his younger brother to keep him at home instead of driving to Boston and he's forced to drive by himself since the authorities didn't have time to find a replacement co-driver.  The drivers of the other two vehicles have instructions to take him out if tries to escape once they're outside of Los Angeles.  The first vehicle is lost when they run into a Gila, a huge lizard, in the Nevada desert.  The survivor from that vehical, Greg, ends up being Tanner's co-driver for a while.  A second vehicle is lost before reaching Salt Lake City when a giant dust devil sucked it up into the air.  Tanner and Greg have a falling out after getting to Indiana when they have to decide between returning to Salt Lake City or going on to Boston.  Tanner wants to continue but Greg wants to go back.  Tanner beats Greg unconscious before droping him off at a farmhouse in Pennsylvania, and later picks up a young biker chick named Corny in New York after wiping out her motorcycle club.  She's killed by a rival motorcycle club when they are forced to drive to Boston on motorcycles after Tanner's armored vehicle suffered too much damage.

The story switches over to Boston every few chapters to show how bad things are with the plague.  These parts of the book reads more like "The Plague" by Albert Camus: the preacher is billowing God's judgment on the people, young lovers are sacrificing themselves to save the other, the doctor and nurse are giving up on the anti-serum ever being delivered, and lawless cops are shooting looters everywhere.  When Tanner arrives in town, he's mistaken for a looter.  The cops back off when they realize that he has a written pardon from the Nation of California in one hand and a live hand grenade in the other.  Tanner, the classical literary anti-hero, gets a hero's welcome into Boston and the plague comes to an end.  The story ends the following spring with Tanner defacing the statue of himself on a motorcycle and stealing two cars on the way out of Boston to disappear into the American wilderness.

I'm incline to go with the book over the movie.  My only disappointment with the book is that it doesn't have the steel-plated, steel-eating cockroaches (which are Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches in makeup) from the movie.  Viewing the movie and reading the book gives an interesting perspective on the times when they were both created.

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