plug: Death Race 2000 (1975)

“Sure it’s violent, but that’s the way we love it, violent violent VIOLENT!!!”

Last week the New Yorker published the best piece of film writing I’ve read all year — “How ‘Starship Troopers’ Aligns with Our Moment of American Defeat,” in which David Roth shows us how Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 bloody-action satire of America’s military-industrial complex “depict[s] a society whose fixation on force has left it preening, idiotic, and paradoxically weak.” May sound familiar, as our own Happy Meal-toy of a fascist President continues to refer to the pandemic he’s all but facilitated as an “invisible enemy” to be defeated in some abstract ritualistic battle. “It has become clear, in these last decades of decadence, decline, towering institutional violence, and rampant bad taste,” Roth writes, “that American life is stuck somewhere inside the Paul Verhoeven cinematic universe.”

Starship Troopers (1997)

And who could argue? Just look at RoboCop, “a gleeful exaggeration of the anxieties of Reagan-era urban life” made more poignant than ever by our current era of well-documented police brutality and militarization; or Total Recall, which largely takes place on a Mars colony “overseen by the private security force of a capitalist who has staked out a monopoly on oxygen itself.” Sounds a lot like what Mars might look like if we let Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos colonize it first. Point is, Verhoeven has always been a master of trolling America by putting an unforgiving mirror to its ugly face, showing us, as Roth describes, “dangerous futures that look and feel like degraded versions of the already degrading present.”

Anyway, today’s plug isn’t a Verhoeven movie, but it is a “proto-Verhoeven,” dystopian sci-fi exploitation effort from the Roger Corman camp, where, to quote the film’s tagline, “hit and run driving is no longer a felony, it’s the national sport.” Not a stretch to imagine in an America where people are hateful enough to plow through crowds of peaceful protesters. Welcome to Death Race 2000.

Death Race 2000 takes place in a post-apocalyptic “future” where a global economic crash has left the world in ruin and America has been restructured into a crude totalitarian regime. Plotwise it’s basically The Hunger Games on wheels. The government — led by a fascist TV personality known only as Mr. President — has pacified the crumbling populous with a Transcontinental Road Race, where celebrity drivers with accompanying pro-wrestler personas and extravagantly themed supercars race across the country and kill civilians for bonus points. Again, only slightly more absurd than the numbers game our dilapidated federal government and state media (Fox News) are playing with COVID deaths. Apparently hundreds of thousands of otherwise saveable lives are a small price to pay when we’re trying to, in the words of Death Race 2000’s Mr. President, “uphold the American tradition of no holds barred.”

Much like RoboCop and Starship Troopers, (or The Hunger Games, The Running Man, Rollerball, and other movies about dystopian gladiatorial entertainment) Death Race 2000’s best and smartest satirical jabs come in its TV segments, all of which do an incredible job roasting the American news and entertainment media for their role in satisfying our impervious blood lust while normalizing the exploitation and mutilation of our bodies.

My favorite performance in the film is that of real-life Los Angeles DJ Don Steele (whose voice you may remember as the constant radio presence in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood) as Death Race announcer Junior Bruce. His voice talents are put to great use with delicious lines like “Sure it’s violent, but that’s the way we love it, violent violent VIOLENT!!!” and “ALRIGHT ALRIGHT AND YESIREE! A clean hit! A Perfect hit! And no pain for the target! Too bad the guy was only 38. Just two years older, he’d have been worth three times the points! BUT, for the second year in a row, Machine Gun Joe has SPLATTERED the scoreboard FIRST!” He also dresses pretty much how I would dress in public if I felt it were socially acceptable to do so.

David Carradine is weird and charming as ever in the role of Frankenstein, national hero and returning Death Race champion, dressed from head to toe in black leather and wearing a mask that covers facial scars we later learn aren’t even real (which both fits into the plot nicely and means we get to see David Carradine’s actual face, in addition to the cool mask and Phantom of the Opera makeup. Best of both worlds really). When asked if he only cares about winning the race, Frankenstein replies, “Yes, it’s the only standard of excellence left.” All in all, real Rocky Horror/Phantom of the Paradise vibes comin’ off this guy.

Opposite Frankenstein in the Death Race power rankings is a young Sylvester Stallone as Machine Gun Joe Viterbo. It’s pretty wild to think this campy Roger Corman flick came out only a year before Rocky made Stallone a household name. Then again, he really brings the heat and flexes his star power in every scene. And you can tell he’s just having a great time playing Captain Hook to Carradine’s Peter Pan. If you’re a Stallone fan, this is a must-see.

The low-fi and high-camp charms of Death Race 2000 only add to its effectiveness as both thoughtful sci-fi and cheap entertainment. As a whole resistance-movement plot unfolds parallel to the actual race (guys I’m really starting to think Hunger Games is a direct adaptation of this movie), you’re treated to the type of gripping, ultraviolent car stunts, wild costumes, and retro-modern set-pieces that are only possible when someone is trying to make something look cool as shit on a shoestring budget. Now that’s movie magic.

Death Race 2000 is a nasty bit of business, a relentless bit of weekend fun, and a wonderful time capsule of ‘70s low-budget genre filmmaking. It’s got everything you could possibly want from a movie in 2020 … or at least, everything I could possibly want from a movie in 2020. People are rediscovering Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion right now because it’s retroactively become a “COVID movie.” It seems to be in direct conversation with the issues and pitfalls that have defined the real pandemic. Death Race 2000 is a sci-fi action spectacle that seems to prophesy of and comment on the dystopian state of our present and probable future, albeit in a hyperstylized way. Its cinematic exploitation of the “decadence, decline, towering institutional violence, and rampant bad taste” of America is a playful reminder that we’ve always kind of been on the verge of a fascist takeover.