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The screenplay is based on the short story The Racer by Ib Melchior. The film takes place in a dystopian American society in the year 2000, where the murderous Transcontinental Road Race has become a form of national entertainment. It's The National Sport!ĭeath Race 2000 is a 1975 cult action film directed by Paul Bartel, and starring David Carradine, Simone Griffeth and Sylvester Stallone.
FILM DEATH RACE 2000 MOVIE
There is a lightly liberal politic at play-a severe woman with a bun named Thomasina Paine is leading a rebellion against America’s despotic leadership, and the movie has a loose media critique-but there is a giddy playfulness in this film that contrasts with the somber tone of even the most trivial entertainment of our own dystopian decade(s). Mary Woronov stars as the racer Calamity Jane, and Sylvester Stallone, on the brink of stardom, is Machine Gun Joe. Mundane interiors are gussied up with modernist furniture and nude bodies.
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The transcontinental race is set in a wide range of locations, from rolling green fields to desert highways. There is no limit on the movie’s inventiveness and imagination, however. Death Race showcases his genius for delivering high-octane action (there are more than a dozen explosions and several vivid car detonations) at dime-store prices. Death Race 2000 is a near perfect B-movie, offering everything you could want from a Roger Corman exploitation film a sick and silly cartoon that stands.
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George Miller has pointed to Death Race as an influence on his Mad Max franchise, and it is plain to see: Bartel/Corman’s film balances comedy, morbidity, social commentary, and entertainment, and packages it in a wildly inventive spectacle of dragon-toothed muscle cars, explosions, and gore that is thrilling and sexy and self-incriminating.Ĭorman has spoken eloquently about the artistic freedom enabled by low-budget movies. On one end rumble Vanishing Point (1971) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), on the other, closing out the decade, are Mad Max (1979) and The Road Warrior (1981). Babies and the elderly are especially high-point earners.ĭeath Race 2000 (1975), directed by Paul Bartel ( Eating Raoul, Private Parts) but solidly a Roger Corman production, and one he is especially proud of, falls in the middle of a line of car-centric movies from that most dystopian, orange-and-brown hued decade.
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Andersons remake of the 1975 Paul Bartel cult film Death Race 2000 is.
FILM DEATH RACE 2000 DRIVER
Lacking agency, the citizens have developed a lunatic blood thirst, fueled by a government-sanctioned road race won by the driver who kills the most pedestrians. Welcome to the Death Race, where hardened convicts and smoking-hot navigators. In the wake of a global economic crisis, the United States has abandoned democracy for totalitarianism and martial law. It’s a future vision that only the 1970s could conjure.
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