I was too young to see Death Race 2000 in the theater, and
while the movie remained a kind of lurking presence in my life, making appearances
in Stephen King's The Stand and in the acknowledgments to Car Wars (one of the
designer games I played), I never watched it until the 1990s and didn't learn to
enjoy the film until very recently. This
is because it is actually rather bad. Produced on a shoestring budget by
schlock-movie producer Roger Corman, Death Race features wooden acting, less sophisticated
production values than the average junior prom, and a script that probably owes
more of its inspiration to the studio coke-wrangler than the writers. (The movie's slapped-together dystopian
future, featuring a dictator with a summer palace in Beijing, an economic
collapse, and fake French terrorists, makes no sense unless one realizes it was
probably written between lines of blow.) One needs a certain level of patience
and experience before one can appreciate bad movies as camp.
As I recently discovered, DR2000 actually has a good bit of
charm, stemming from Corman's ability to attract a variety of talents to his
movies. The central plot device, a
coast-to-coast road race in which contestants win points for running over
pedestrians, makes little sense except as a fantasy, but like George Romero's
contemporaneous zombie movies it makes for lots of action and several
opportunities for humor. I am thinking
in particular of the nursing-home that used the Deathrace to dispose of
inmates ("Euthanasia Day"), the commentators' observation that it was tragic that one victim
was only 38 because he would have been worth more points at 40, and the color
commentators' own over-the-top expressions and commentary. These last were played by disc-jockey Don
Steele and talented career actress Joyce Jameson; theirs was the least wooden
acting in the film, but several others had opportunities to
prove their acting chops, including Sylvester Stallone, who delivered his goofy lines
with a certain thuggish enthusiasm. (E.g. “You know, Myra, some people might think you’re cute, but me, I
think you’re a very large baked potato.” No, I don't know what it means either.) Recognizing that the movie's script
didn't exactly give the actors much room for, you know, acting, the director
and production designers instead differentiated between the racers by giving
each one a campy, stereotyped theme: one racer (Stallone) had a hoodlum's car
with a giant switchblade attached, one (David Carradine) drove a lizard car, went by the sobriquet “Frankenstein,” and wore a leather fetish suit and
gimp mask, one car had a bull's horns and cowgirl driver (“Calamity Jane”), and one had a Nazi theme. To add an additional element of conflict, the writers threw in an underground resistance movement determined to
sabotage the race, whose leader was the elderly “Thomasina Paine.” How cool is that?
As one reviewer concluded, “You’re not here to hear discourse on the decline of
America, you’re here to see these ridiculous cars kill a bunch of people, have
a few laughs, and see some women take their clothes off .” And David Carradine,
who manages to disrobe gracefully even when marinated in whiskey. As he usually was.
*
Image above via Wikimedia Commons. Deathrace 2000 is (I think) Copyright (c) 1975 by New World Pictures.
