Death Race 2000.

Time to jump backwards in time, by eleven years, way before even Paradise Alley to a film critically panned, that is these days regarded as a cult classic. Enjoy!


Death Race 2000 is based on a short story and at the time criticised for its extreme violence and nudity but people have warmed to it over the years. Does it deserve to be a cult classic? Is it just shamelessly gratuitous? Well let's find out...

There is a lot of plot to Death Race 2000, but absolutely nothing is explained or explored - which is a shame because some of it seems really interesting. We have Government Manufactured racers, robotic augmentation, Nazis and a version of America that would make the Nazis blush, it doesn't even really get a chance to make much of a cool backdrop either because all of it is just too random and moving too fast, the film just leaves you disoriented and confused.  The immediate plot is that every street in America has been emptied for a race...somehow. This is like the Olympics but for America apparently. And if anyone decides to get on the road anyway, the racers have every right to murder them and they get points for it - points rest on gender and age. Then some resistance people get involved and eh...whatever.

Stallone plays 'Machine Gun' Joe - his Wacky Racer I suppose is closest too the Bulletproof Bomb 7 with the whole gangster theme he has going on. He is basically second best in the race. Second to 'Frankenstien' a guy dressed like a mix of a gimp and superhero - or a shit Darth Vader who is of course played by the late David Carradine. His character makes absolutely no sense. Both Carradine, Stallone and the rest of the cast all act terribly, if I didn't know better I'd assume they were all recording for a 4kids dub. About the only good thing I can say about the cast is that femalewise, they are all gorgeous - well except that weird commentator. And yes you can sing 'and feminism marches on' with how exploited the girls are, but lots of naked pretty girls, well sorry but I won't complain about that.

Death Race 2000 looks like shit. Sets? Fuck that, we'll just draw the buildings on. Even the scale feels diminished, there are five racers, each one has a lot of personality sure, but five? You couldn't even push that up to ten? Jesus. Plus the gore is really inconsistent as well, for every exploding head and lost limb, someone will go down in an awkwardly edited, oddly bloodless jump and roll. Just awful.

I can't even be happy about the swift pacing, because the whole thing moves so fast it just feels rushed as hell.

Really I could forget every problem with this movie if the whole film wasn't so mean spirited. I'm no prude...but this just seems a really sick an idea for a movie and it's played for laughs and that just makes even more offensive. There is nothing cool about being nasty for nasties sake, it takes some really intelligent writing to make something this horrible funny - and the film fails at it.  So just be warned, the drawn backgrounds, the goofy looking cars and the rubber weapons don't stop this being a truly gruesome and nasty film. Even the resistance fighters and twist motivations for Frankenstein still all involve murder - as this film is apparently some kind of critique of violence in the American media but it's just not intelligent enough to pull it off.

So do I recommend it? Death Race 2000 has a lot of cool ideas and a lot of beautiful women but the execution is just awful. The special effects are atrocious, the acting is bad and this movie makes no Goddamn sense. Avoid.

Think About It!

-Locke