Well, we could start a Starcrash thread, but I think we'd be talking more about Caroline Munro than the story...
The car had been sitting there for hours. The trucks weren't right behind them. Why is it any less "cheap" if he wandered through the mist to find the trucks in a clearing? Rescue was closer than he thought in either scenario. Rescue existed in both scenarios; the tragedy was that they didn't know and they gave up in both scenarios.