DEATH RACE 2000 - Road Rage XTREME!

In honor (sic) of the Death Race remake just released in theaters, I decided I'd take a look at the vastly superior old school movie that spawned it.

Welcome to The Future, AKA the year 2,000. America is ruled by an evil dictator posing as the president. Civil liberties have eroded, fascism is everywhere, a financial crisis grips the land, people seek pleasure not in the fiction of television and movies, but in the visceral reality of blood sport: the Death Race.

I'd make a joke about how the movie missed their date by eight years, but I hate taking the obvious cheap shot. Insert your own Bush joke here.

Every year, the president gathers psychopaths and mass murders, places them behind the wheel of custom made death machines (designed for the movie by Dean Jeffries, who also customized the Monkee-mobile) covered in spikes and missiles and machine guns and armor plating and lets them race coast to coast as fast and as violently as they can. The goal is to score as many points as possible, by running down pedestrians and bystanders.

We get all manner of colorful racers - folks like Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov of Rock N Roll High School), Matilda The Hun (Roberta Collins of Caged Heat), and Nero The Hero (Martin Kove). But of the lot, Frankenstein (None other than young grasshopper, David Carradine) is the most celebrated of the Death Racers. Rebuilt time and again after many spectacular crashes, Frankenstein is rumored to live up to his name, being more machine than man. The number two man in the race is Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (played by the slightly pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone) who hates his number two position and will do anything to knock Frankenstein out of the race.

And so it goes, with over the top murders, macabre humor, loads of satire and some pretty cartoon violence. We even get the ol' "Fake tunnel in the road so someone goes over a cliff" gag straight out of a Road Runner cartoon. In-between the various legs of the race, we get stupid soap-opera antics, some basic character development from Frankenstein who is out to assassinate the president with an explosive built into his robotic hand (and don’t worry - Carradine makes the Hand Grenade joke so I don’t have to) before retiring to their hotel rooms for some gratuitous nudity and some rumpy-pumpy before we get a ham-fisted love story.

As one could guess, this is not a serious movie. Roger Corman, king of the B-movies knows this and keeps things moving along almost like a live action cartoon. A group of doctors wheel their geriatric charges into the race course as offerings for the Road Warriors, but Frankenstein swerves at the last second and takes out all the by-standing doctors - that's the level of dark comedy we get here. Oh, and the action racing bits are actually staged pretty well, for a low budget exploitation flick.

Carradine is perfect as the mumbling, laconic Frankenstein, a poor man's Darth Vader. Meanwhile Sly is great as Machine Gun Joe. Sly plays it like he's about to burst a vain and have an aneurism. He rants, he swears, he murders people gratuitously (I mean gratuitous even for the Death Race. Sure he scored points, but running over your own pit crew just because they laughed at you seems a tad extreme in my book). If David wasn’t in the movie, Sly would be stealing the show (although he'd have some serious competition from legendary disc jockey "The Real Don Steele" who gives a pricelessly play-by-play).

Is Death Race 2000 a good movie? Heavens no - but it is a damn fun flick. In the long list of So-Bad-Its-Good movies, Death Race is clearly at the top of the pile.

THE DVD -
There are several copies of this film floating around. The version I have - part of the Roger Corman collection - looks pretty good with a 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen print. The colors look good and the print looks okay. The 2.0 sound is fine, but it's not going to blow your doors off.

THE EXTRAS -
The New Concorde release has just a couple of extras: a 10-minute retrospective with Leonard Maltin with come of the cast and crew, a couple of trailers for other Roger Corman greats and a commentary track from the man himself - Roger Corman - accompanied by Mary Woronov.

THE BOTTOM LINE -
Even if you've never seen Death Race 2000, I'd lay odds that you at least know of the flick. How many times have folks point to someone on the side of the road and go "20 points for the old woman!" or something similar. It's an iconic work - even if you've never heard of it. And if you're willing to lighten up and enjoy some mid-seventies schlock, you'll find this is a pretty good flick.