In a genre too often bloated with pretension, B-movie impresario Roger Corman and his team of drive-in auteurs turned in a free-wheeling political burlesque wrapped inside a greasy circus of T&A. You got your satire in my exploitation flick-no, you got your exploitation flick in my satire! Said to be futuristic, but not too unlike our own world, Death Race 2000 (1975) mixes pulp and politics with drunken glee. A gory hit-n-run fulmination, a sci-fi parable about dehumanization, a scathing libel against a TV-addled culture amused by the sufferings of others, or just a popcorn freakshow to pass a lazy Saturday afternoon-you name it, Death Race 2000's got it.

Even today, drivers still sardonically joke about running over pedestrians for points. Not many B-pictures have that kind of lasting pop cultural resonance-then again, Death Race 2000 is not your average B-picture.

SYNOPSIS: Fear the future: A grim place ruled by the cruel law of winner take all. It's an every-man-for-himself sort of unfairground, where the smallest and most vulnerable can count on no special protection. Nowhere is this more evident than the country's favorite sport, the Trans-Continental Road Race. As the President himself proudly boasts, it is a contest that upholds the grand American tradition of no holds barred! Racers compete not just to be first across the amber waves of ruin and purple mountain travesties, but to earn points by killing pedestrians in their path. It is a brutal past-time, with body counts bringing the murderers fame and fortune.

The racers gather at the starting point: colorful characters like Nero the Hero (Martin Kove), Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins), and Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov). The always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride "Machine Gun" Joe Viterbo (Sylvester Stallone) rails angrily against the champ, Frankenstein (David Carradine). More a legend than a man, Frankenstein is the product of Swiss engineers whose bionic limbs and replacement body parts keep him going after each crash. Underneath his leather face mask, Frankenstein hides a secret: he is in fact legend, not man. There are no brilliant surgeons. After each wreck, a new "Frankenstein" is recruited and sent out in costume to play the role, proving that the lives of the racers are no more valued than those of the hapless souls they score en route.

Anti-Race revolutionaries lay traps worthy of Wile E. Coyote, and one of their number (Simone Griffeth) goes undercover as Frankenstein's new navigator, plotting to sabotage the race. Little does she know that the fabled racer at her side has his own historic ambitions...

Death Race 2000 could easily have been stitched together by Swiss scientists, using modern technology to precision engineer a perfect exploitation film. Veering dizzily from piquant satire to absurdist farce to biting social critique, with plenty of gratuitous nudity and head-bursting gore, all at a breakneck pace, the film never gives the viewer a chance not to be entertained. Generations of filmmakers would be influenced to follow suit: 1981's The Road Warrior, 1985's Doctor Who serial Vengeance on Varos, 1987's The Running Man, 2001's Series 7: The Contenders, 2006's Idiocracy are but a sampler of the apocalyptic sci-fi satires taking an obvious inspiration from Death Race 2000. Not to mention the most bald-faced copy of all, the upcoming Death Race 3000 by director Paul W. S. Anderson with star Jason Statham. Not bad for a movie shot in only 17 days.

David Carradine had just finished his three-year tour of duty on TV's Kung Fu. That experience had brought him popularity and success, but also a troubled reputation, and it was now over. His future was uncertain, and he felt torn between gratitude and resentment towards his own public image. It was as if the role of Frankenstein had been written especially for him, a chance to rewrite his own legend. Frankenstein's delicious complexity and moral ambiguity depends on the audience's familiarity with Carradine as a heroic figure, seemingly now cast as a callous killer indifferent to the suffering of innocents. Villain and hero wrapped in one, Carradine's Frankenstein keeps the audience guessing to the end.

Meanwhile, Sylvester Stallone approaches his role as Machine Gun Joe with a cartoonishly exaggerated villainy. He chews the scenery so thoroughly it's a wonder the other actors don't slip on all the drool. It is an over-the-top performance Sly would tap again, decades later, as the baddie in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003). He asked for and won the right to rewrite his dialog in his own style. Between takes, Stallone hunkered off to the quiet corners of the set to work on writing a boxing picture he had in mind. Death Race 3000 was Stallone's third movie, and he was paid $1,000 a week for it. Post-Rocky (1976), the man would be worth $10 million per film; Corman had an uncanny knack to discover young talent just before it broke big.

As Calamity Jane, Mary Woronov appears in one of her first Hollywood gigs (she had previously acted in Oliver Stone's Seizure (1974) and three films for director Theodore Gershuny). She was used to a different kind of acting experience in Andy Warhol's improvised productions. Within a short span, she went from the performance art of Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable to making exploitation flicks for Roger Corman, but she didn't see this as such a contradiction. "Warhol and Corman had a very similar mentality," says Woronov, "I call Roger Corman the Andy Warhol of the West Coast, for me anyway." It marked the first collaboration between Woronov and director Paul Bartel, who discovered kindred spirits in one another. The two would work together on numerous films over the following years, most notably their indie hit Eating Raoul (1982).

Corman and Bartel assembled an equally impressive roster of talent behind the cameras. Cinematographer Tak Fujimoto had already cut his Corman teeth on the women-in-prison flick Caged Heat (1974). Fujimoto took a leaf from the books of Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) and Edgar G. Ulmer's Beyond the Time Barrier (1960), maximizing production value on his tight budget by casting striking works of modern architecture as futuristic cityscapes. Within a few years, Fujimoto would be on the photography staff of Star Wars (1977), and eventually would become the award-winning Director of Photography for the likes of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Philadelphia (1993), The Sixth Sense (1999) and other major Hollywood hits. That Corman sure could pick 'em.

This was the calling card of New World, and every other outfit Corman lent his name to over the years. He was not alone in making impoverished exploitation pictures, but he was rare in taking such things seriously as films. Even the lowliest grindhouse flick could be distinguished and ennobled, because the audience doesn't care how much a movie cost, just how much fun it is. So movies like Death Race 2000 linger as enduring examples of that grand American tradition of no holds barred.

Producer: Roger Corman, Jim Weatherill
Director: Paul Bartel
Screenplay: Robert Thom, Charles Griffith, Ib Melchior
Cinematography: Tak Fujimoto
Film Editing: Tina Hirsch
Art Direction: Beala Neel, Robin Royce
Music: Paul Chihara
Cast: David Carradine (Frankenstein), Simone Griffeth (Annie Smith), Sylvester Stallone (Machine Gun Joe Viterbo), Mary Woronov (Calamity Jane), Roberta Collins (Matilda the Hun), Martin Kove (Nero the Hero).
C-84m.

by David Kalat