Does any movie have a more destined-to-be-a-cult-film pedigree than Death Race 2000? This story of a nationally televised cross-country drag race through a near-future totalitarian United States where every pedestrian mowed down and killed is worth a certain amount of points was produced by Roger Corman for his New World Pictures company, directed by Paul Bartel, and written by Corman vets Charles B. Griffith and Robert Thom, with a cast including David Carradine, Mary Woronov, a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone, Roberta Collins, Martin Kove, Louisa Moritz, and The Real Don Steele. The combined life work of nearly every human being involved in this movie (including the work of people they mentored, collaborated with, learned from, or befriended) could give you a near-complete picture of underground and countercultural movements, pop culture, radio, independent filmmaking, drive-in/exploitation filmmaking, mainstream Hollywood television and film, and the business of mass media in the 20th century United States.
A claim like that may lead you to believe that Death Race 2000 is a vital and important landmark in cinema history. It's not, though it is a goofy, fun, visually striking, fast-paced drive-in movie, and a great example of Roger Corman in the '70s (with some personal Paul Bartel touches). That claim is, however, a tribute to the thriving subcultures of 20th century life that have mostly been flattened, homogenized, or destroyed by 21st century technology and venture capitalism. (Maybe a little of this is old-man-yelling-at-cloud business, and there are still new forms taking shape and people making great things outside of the dominant systems, but we live in a lonelier and more standardized and corporatized world than we used to, culturally and subculturally speaking.)
For the few people who have never seen it, Death Race 2000 takes place in the once futuristic and now retro-futuristic year 2000. An unnamed nationwide economic and communication-disabling disaster took place in 1979 (the French are blamed), leading the United States to adopt a totalitarian governmental system mixing fascism, communism, and bloodsport into an incoherent slurry.
The permanent president (Sandy McCallum) created the titular annual death race, officially known as the Transcontinental Road Race, a cross-country jaunt from New York City to Los Angeles, with 12-hour pit stops in St. Louis and Albuquerque. The event is broadcast nationally and hosted by Junior Bruce (legendary Los Angeles DJ The Real Don Steele) and Grace Pander (Joyce Jameson), a sort of proto-Martha Stewart/Robin Leach hybrid who hosts a popular TV show from her living room. Each souped-up dragster has a driver and a navigator, and the goals are to hit the finish line first and to kill as many pedestrians as possible. The point system favors women and children over men, with elderly people supplying the highest scores.
The five drivers in this year's race are Nero the Hero (The Karate Kid's Martin Kove) and his ample-cleavaged navigator Cleopatra (former Miss Hawaii Leslie McRay), Midwest Nazi Matilda the Hun (Corman regular Roberta Collins) and her German navigator Herman (The Love Boat's Fred Grandy), Calamity Jane (Warhol Factory scenester/Velvet Underground dancer/cult movie legend Mary Woronov), wearing a helmet that looks like it was designed by Nudie Cohn, and her navigator Pete (theater actor/director and Brian de Palma buddy William Shepard), Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (Sylvester Stallone, months away from never having to work for a Roger Corman paycheck again) and his blonde bombshell navigator Myra (Louisa Moritz, cult movie and TV veteran), and, last but not least, winner of multiple previous death races, Frankenstein (David Carradine), a disfigured bionic man and survivor of multiple crashes and limb transplants, decked out in black leather body suit and cape. His navigator Annie (Simone Griffeth, who mostly works in TV) is secretly working for The Resistance, led by the elderly Thomasina Paine (Harriet Medin), an organization attempting, without much success, to end the death race and the totalitarian regime. Whew.
Death Race 2000 is a little thin and the satire doesn't hit quite as hard as it should, but Paul Bartel is a sharp, funny filmmaker with a great eye who understands how much the camera loves the faces of his charismatic cast. (He also appears in a cameo as Frankenstein's doctor.) By doing everything else so well, he makes you forget that the movie is not exploring much of the world it sets up. Imagine what a Bartel untethered by budget, running time restrictions, and Corman's quick schedules could have done with the material.
Bartel was a director, writer, and actor whose resumé is filled with cult classics and occasional dips into the mainstream, frequently collaborating with his good friend Woronov. My favorites among the films he directed are Private Parts, a psychosexual horror-thriller that makes great use of its skid row hotel location, and the dark comedy Eating Raoul. Bartel died in 2000.
For a guy whose main goal was to make a profit as quickly and cheaply as possible and then keep doing that in perpetuity, Roger Corman, who died just four months ago at the age of 98, also made an enormous impact on film and film culture. It's hard to imagine a world without him. I don't think a week has gone by in my 47 years where I haven't seen something that hasn't been touched by Roger Corman in some way, whether it was one of the hundreds of drive-in movies he produced, directed, or distributed, one of the foreign films he brought to the United States as a distributor, or one of the thousands of movies featuring a director, actor, editor, costume designer, set decorator, cinematographer, writer, producer, or stunt performer who got their start working for Corman. He used to tell people, "My goal is that you never have to work for me again." As someone with a love for nearly every kind of film, from high art to the cheapest shlock, I have nothing but gratitude and respect for the man. He was a businessman who loved making money without spending money, but he was also an artist who loved movies. And he was pretty damn good at both.
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