I wonder how many points I would be worth. At least thirty, I would hope...
Death Race 2000 posits a dystopian future where America has just recently put itself together after a major financial crisis. The totalitarian government is run from overseas, now with no separation between church (any church) and state and no party lines. To appease the masses, the government holds an annual event called the Transcontinental Road Race, a cross-country race where the drivers cut a bloody swath from one end of the nation to the next. But in this race, points aren’t tallied up by being the fastest, but in how many innocent bystanders the racers run over. In a handy sportscast, the reporter outlines the point value for each demographic, where basically the more helpless the victim, the more points they’re worth (toddlers and the elderly being worth the most).
The top racer and the government’s champion is a masked mystery man known only as Frankenstein (David Carradine), a super racer stitched together from his many crashes with cybernetic enhancements. Each racer has a navigator that rides shot-gun and provides useful advice: Frankenstein’s lost every single one of his previous navigators, and it appears from the start that his new one, Annie Smith (Simone Griffeth), may not make it either. But what Frankenstein doesn’t know is that Annie is actually an agent working with a rebel organization - who’s goal is to dethrone the government and sabotage the race from the inside out.
Death Race 2000 continues the fine tradition of 70’s exploitation; a Roger Corman classic with no shortage of nudity, gory deaths and hammy acting. When dealing with such extreme subject matter, you can take it two different ways: that of complete sadism or dark, dark humor. Death Race 2000 opts for the latter - delivering a cartoonish movie that has far more in common with Wacky Races than Rollerball - and manages to mostly succeed: skewering corporate culture and faulty governments with some rather sharp (if completely unsubtle) satire. It’s violence was the kind that only could have come out of a post-Vietnam mindset, so extreme and horrific that it becomes absurd. Death Race 2000 embraces that absurdness whole-heartedly, and as a result is a complete blast to sit through from beginning to end.
Vietnam was a shadow that hung over everything in pop culture for years to come, and was most embraced in exploitation - possibly because it allowed a venue for hack filmmakers to pimp their hyper-violent, hyper-sexualized fantasies to titillate audiences and get butts in seats. Car and road movies were especially bathed in this sort of bleak nihilism, whether it was the veteran coming to terms with being back home in Vanishing Point or the existentialist chronicle of the counter-culture movements in Easy Rider. Death Race 2000 is about as far afield of those movies as you can get in terms of tone and style, but the themes are there all the same. This is a post-war movie, made from a post-war mindset, where lives are little more than points on a scoreboard tallied up to see who “wins.”
Even the name of the main character echoes the post-wartime themes. The original horror movies were born largely out of the aftermath of World War I, where soldiers were coming back home scarred and deformed, reflected in the movies by the monsters of The Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein. Karloff’s portrayal of the monster in the 1931 film was especially evocative of many war veterans - a scarred, broken man both alienated and misunderstood by everyone around him. As the namesake character of Death Race 2000, David Carradine gives off a similar energy - strange, morally grey, slightly inhuman - but possessed of the tough guy charisma of Bronson, McQueen and Eastwood with his own specialized brand of weirdness. When we first see Frankenstein, he’s like some bizarre mash-up of superhero and leather fetishist, complete with cape and gloves and a form-fitting bodysuit. He also wears a mask, presumably to hide his scarred face, but we later learn he has no scars underneath. Indeed, his only deformity is his missing right hand, replaced by a cybernetic appendage that enables him to change gears faster. We find out he keeps a grenade embedded in that robotic hand (which he refers to as his “hand grenade”), in the hopes of using it to kill the President when he wins the race and shakes his hand…
…something that his navigator/resistance fighter Annie is surprised to hear. Annie is the granddaughter of revolution leader Thomasina Paine (herself the descendent of Thomas Paine), and their plan revolves around replacing Frankenstein with their own driver in order to sabotage the race. Which winds up being a moot point when they find out Frankenstein is sympathetic to their aim - largely because there is no true Frankenstein. It’s just a persona that’s passed on by the government from driver to driver in an endless cycle - a cycle the new Frankenstein is eager to break.
The other drivers are in keeping with the cartoony, comic book palette (with drivers based on cowgirls, Nazis, and ancient Rome), and are played by the actors as such, but the film is probably most notable for featuring Sylvester Stallone (a year out from superstardom with Rocky), who plays the mobster racer Machine Gun Joe Viterbo. Stallone starts off the movie as kind of grating, but as the film goes on his character blends more into the wild and crazy world, providing an excellent antagonist for Frankenstein. He also has a really cool knife on the hood of his car, which he uses to skewer many victims (one crotch first!).
The way the hit-and-run scenes are handled are still shockingly violent, even by today’s standards. But the satirical nature of the movie keeps them from being too disturbing, and also provides some rather provocative insights. Consider the film’s most famous scene, where a town hospital puts their elderly patients out in the road for the drivers to run over and therefore score some easy points (the race commentators crudely announce that it’s the way the hospital “clears out more room”). None of them actually get hit, as Frankenstein winds up turning at the last minute and plowing down the doctors and nurses who put the old folks out in the first place. But there is an interesting, tragic commentary going on - a statement on a society that puts its elderly in nursing homes to basically be forgotten and die. There’s also a moment where Frankenstein meets one of his many groupies (the racers in this world are a lot like rock stars), who throws herself out in the middle of the street to be run over by her idol - indicative of a culture that places so little worth in the average individual that they would rather sacrifice themselves just for a moment to be a part of their favorite stars' lives - even if that means being killed by them.
Although crass, crude and generally offensive to just about everybody, there is definitely more going on beneath Death Race 2000’s hood than is immediatley apparent from the outside, which - all things considered - is still a heaping-helping of twisted fun.
* It’s also worth noting that the film takes place in the year 2000 - tens years on and thankfully the world didn’t collapse and we’re not racing and killing each other for sport. But consider the fact that reality shows like Survivor and Big Brother started in 2000, and there really was a national crisis and a war all too similar to Vietnam soon after that, and the similarities are more frighteningly prominent than you would at first think.
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