Death Race 2000 (the title says it all!)

Death Race 2000 is an incredibly cheesy dark comedy from 1975. It stars David Carradine, who was hot off his TV show Kung Fu, and a mostly unknown Sylvester Stallone just a year before he became Rocky.

This movie is set in the future, in a time when the world has collapsed and the leader is someone they call Mr. President. It never gets much into the actual time period of the conditions of this new world, other than to include a few visual clues as to how far in the future it is set. The story is about a sort of game show where race car drivers go from New York to Los Angeles in a very violent race that lets them score points for hitting people.

Before watching, I had no idea what this movie was about other than it had something to do with a race. When the first guy is run down and basically gored by a large blade attached to the front of a car, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, but still laughed at how ridiculous it was. Everything about this movie was way over the top, and the violence is as silly as it is bloody. I had to appreciate the enthusiasm of the announcers as they ran down the scoring system used to tally up the value of human targets, with babies and the elderly being worth the most points.

The DVD features some brief interviews with a few members of the cast and crew, and they explain how it took a couple of years for people to really grasp what this movie was about. At first glance, it seems just like some silly kind of futuristic murder race with a plot so hokey it might be better suited for a video game as opposed to a movie. However, underneath all the camp and cheese, there’s some underlying social commentary about the entertainment value of death and violence. This movie takes that notion to the extreme, but many other movies after it have also used the same bit of satire, including The Running Man and The Condemned.

From beginning to end, this is a classic B-grade movie with all the cheap thrills you can expect. The acting is pretty bad, but mostly because the dialogue was so awful. Some of the car chase sequences were pretty good, though the low budget restraints of the production really shine through. All of the cars they drive were just kit cars and obviously didn’t go very fast because you can tell the film had been sped up during the fast parts. It makes the chases look like something out of an old movie from the 30’s where the timing doesn’t look right.

On an interesting side note, several people in this movie went on to become heavyweights in Hollywood. Carradine was already pretty well established before this came out, but Stallone went on to be a huge star. Another cast member, Martin Kove, would later work again with Stallone in Rambo II. The director of photography, Tak Fujimoto, would go on to be one of the most respected cinematographers in the business. He would later do such movies as Gladiator and The Sixth Sense.

If you can appreciate deliberately cheesy movies, I think you’ll get a kick out of Death Race 2000. It’s as offensive as it is hilarious, but I think that plays into the satire even better. I wouldn’t be surprised if this movie didn’t get remade one of these days.