‘If they scatter, go for the baby and the mother...’
The B-movie is a grand cinematic tradition of which I know little about. Those big ’80s and ’90s action movies seem to follow in that tradition, and stuff like The Best of the Best and No Retreat, No Surrender are certainly in the same ballpark, but the glory era of the B-movie was the 1970s. Death Race 2000 dropped midway through that decade and I’m here to tell you, dear reader, that it is absolutely preposterous…
In a dystopian America, an annual ‘death race’ requires drivers to cross the country in a bloody race to the death. For reasons that are never made clear, the contestants score points for murdering passing civilians. The main driver here and our protagonist is Frankenstein (David Carradine) – a man so named because he has had a couple of limbs exchanged for bionic replacements. The rest of the drivers are made up of Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins), Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (Sylvester Stallone) and some other guy who is killed early doors and whose name I didn’t catch. Trust me, it’s not important. This all takes place against the backdrop of freedom fighters attempting to halt the race, led by double agent Annie Smith (Simone Griffeth).
Quite a lot to pack in to 80 minutes then, but director Paul Bartel keeps things nice and simple and keeps the thrills and spills coming thick and fast. The whole cast seem to know exactly what kind of movie they are making and act accordingly. Stallone hams it up in a rare villainous role, while Carradine plays the strong and silent type to perfection. In terms of pure entertainment, surely the only metric by which a film entitled Death Race 2000 should be judged, this is an unqualified success.
What makes a B-movie a B-movie? Violence? Gratuitous nudity? Lack of budget? A production credit for Roger Corman? Well, Death Race 2000 ticks all of these boxes (although the violence is mainly implied), but it doesn’t suffer because of it. This is a film that wears its modest intentions on its sleeve. This is a film for teenagers to enjoy in packed multiplexes. It’s a film for adults to turn their brain off and simply enjoy.
Not all movies in this genre have stood the test of time in fact, hardly any of them have, but Death Race 2000 still has the ability to thrill all these years later. A whole lot of fun.