1:07PM, Oct 23, 2008
"In the year 2000 hit and run driving is no longer a felony. It's the national sport!"
Crass, exploitative, satirical and witty, Death Race 2000 screamed out of Roger Corman’s New World studio in 1975, and beat the similarly themed but dreary and dour Rollerball over the finish line.
The recent remake should put the spotlight on Paul Bartel’s wacky races once again, and it still has power under the engine, even though there is rust on the body and a sump oil leakage.
In the year 2000 the US has been transformed into militaristic theocracy the United Provinces of America where the top 5% control virtually all the wealth, the have-not masses are placated by gaudy reality TV, the President is an all-smiles huckster land-grabbing the globe, and the French are blamed for all the world’s ills.
If the film had been called Death Race 2003, or any year onwards, it would have knocked Nostradamus out the park, but Death Race 2000 is close enough to doff the hat to writers Robert Thom and Charles Griffith.
As of 2008 there is no televised road-rage race where killing pedestrians equals big points (the young and old pick up hefty bonuses) but Survivor and Fear Factor are laying the proper foundations.
Cult director/actor Paul Bartel (who cameos as a doctor) keeps the film to an economic 79 minutes, most of it on the road, where Frankenstein (Kill Bill’s David Carradine) automotively dukes it out with a four other freakish drivers, chiefly his arch-nemesis and John Dillinger throwback Machine Gun Joe (a cusp-of-fame Sylvester Stallone).Unbeknownst to Frankenstein, his sexy navigator Annie (Simone Griffeth, who settled into TV after this), is granddaughter of chief-freedom fighter Thomasina Paine (satire), and is helping the resistance sabotage the race and kidnap the black clad audience favourite.
Death Race 2000 succeeds despite a starvation budget – apart from one early matte shot there is little to suggest this is future, and supremo accountant Roger Corman uses the threat to pedestrians to keep the film largely extra free (there are probably as many actors in the prison-based remake as in this cross-country movie).
The cars, redressed VWs, Corvettes and Fiats, lack the muscle car “oomph” of Bullitt or Vanishing Point, or the ugly brutality of Mad Max 2’s vehicles, but the “Transcontinental Road Race” (never referred to onscreen as the Death Race) is shot in backwater roads with a raw energy that Tarantino would lift for Death Proof, and Bartel’s liberal use of gore (limbs are displaced, torsos run through, heads mashed) makes this the first automobile slasher movie.
Carradine took the gig (rejected by Peter Fonda as ridiculous) to wash away his Kung-Fu typecasting, and his black outfit and cape predates Darth Vader by about two years, while on the basis of this movie Stallone looked set on a career of comedy bad-guys until Rocky changed everything a year later.
Paul WS Anderson’s remake is a better car movie, owing as much to Mad Max 2 as to this movie, retaining the characters Frankenstein and Machine Gun Joe (played by Jason Statham and Tyrese Gibbs), sexy navigators and a twist on the Frankenstein legend, but little else.
But, without Death Race 2000 there may not have been a Mad Max, and there certainly would not have been Carmageddon, the late nineties game (best played on the PC) that ripped off the “points for pedestrians” plot and was originally designed as a tie-in with a proposed Death Race 2020 sequel (although 1977’s Deathsport was a kind of follow-up).
The original film should be remembered as a top gear B-movie with 700 horsepower satire under the hood.
Rob Daniel
