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Ian Cameron Death Race 2000 (London Pavilion, 'X' Certificate) is a low budget exploitation movie, and none the worse for that. Obviously calculated as a follow-up to the expensively Publicised Rollerball, it ekes out its vision of the future on the slimmest of bankrolls. Perhaps its very cheapness allows it freedom from more debilitating forms of commercial calculations (like, for example, trying not to offend anyone), and it proceeds With a cheerful lack of restraint.
The exploitable ingredient borrowed from Rollerball is the idea of a murderous national sport contrived to harness the passions of the populace. 'Once more,' says the President, 'I give you . . . what you want,' Which is a transcontinental car race that 'Upholds the American tradition of no holds barred. But it's not just a race: it also has a Points system formalising the motorist's fantasy in which pedestrians become skittles and You score double for old age pensioners. The basic premise is very simple, which is seemingly the norm for movies set in the future or in space. But where the big budget Pictures often lose their tiny ideas among Prodigies of set building and special effects, Death Race 2000 manages to live by its wits, elaborating on the story with admirable inventiveness. Like professional wrestlers, the contestants have stage personas as good guys or bad guys. The favourite is the leather-hooded Frankenstein (David Carradine), 'with half a face and half a chest and all the guts in the world . . . America loves You, Frankenstein'. His rival is Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (Sylvester Stallone), 'loved by thousands, hated by millions'. With a refreshing lack of interest in communication eellriulogy, the massive television coverage IS represented through three neat caricatures: excitable sports commentatorprofessionally unsmiling news analyst and blowzy chat show hostess—archetypal denizens of any American television channel. With government (and religion) identified with the race, naturakly there has to be a
i _esistance movement bent on stopping t. ;11,e slightly reluctant leader of this resource"?' band is a composite from the past:
homasina Paine dresses like a 1900 refor:!ler Matriarch and makes a pirate television surOadcast standing in front of the Stars and .tripes, invoking the names of Washington, Lincoln and Harry Truman. The script suffuses the comic strip boldness of its outline with a sly humour. It cwoves from whimsical re-ordering of the o nn. temporary American scene to the fake ube intentional comedy of the later dialogue mitween Frankenstein, who is not the awiracIF of spare part surgery that he seems,
u his girl navigator, a member of the resistance who is Thomasina Paine's granddaughter. What is unusual among well written cheapies is that here the felicities of the script are well served by the direction, which adopts an economically schematic visual style full of whammy close-ups. The action is played all-out in a way that makes it unthinkable for a car to crash without also exploding in flames. The style is held consistently right up to the absurdly happy ending: Frankenstein, who has only been masquerading as an establishment figure in order to assassinate the President, succeeds. He becomes President, marries the navigator, abolishes the race and brings his grandmother-in-law into the government.
It would be easy, out of sheer gratitude for a wholly enjoyable seventy-nine minutes, to overrate Death Race 2000. Critics who unearth occasional goodies among the usual dross of exploitation pictures are liable to rush into hailing their finds as major discoveries. This process happened in the 'sixties to Roger Corman, whose vast output as a director of cheapies seems to me largely undistinguished. Corman, however, has now mutated into a very shrewd entrepreneur who doubles as the American dis tributor of Ingmar Bergman films and a producer of exploitation movies, many of which are made by new directors. Death Race 2000 is one of these, and at the least its novice director,Paul Bartel, shows promise—he never lets the side down. But the film clearly owes a lot to uniformly excellent actors, to its clever producer and to the two old hands who scripted it, Robert Thom and Charles B. Griffith. The original story is by lb Melchior who wrote one of the classics of low budget science fiction, Robinson Crusoe on Mars.
Death Race 2000 has not crept out entirely unheralded—these days, anything so enjoyable gets snapped up by film festivals. It has been shown at the Edinburgh and London festivals. In a way, this is curiously fitting, for the humour belongs with such festival material as the Italian black comedies of Marco Ferreri. A shot of wheelchairs being lined up across a road is announced as Euthanasia Day at the geriatric hospital. Before any offended patrons have had time to head for the exit, the gag is capped with a malicious variant on a W. C. Fields invention from The Bank Dick: Frankenstein drives through the staff who have been watching from the hospital terrace. The car is out of sight but its progress is shown by a series of white-coated bodies being hurled in the air. Death Race 2000 may be little more than a chain of comic inventions stretched tautly over nothing much, but for all those who like their sex and violence leavened with wit, it is quite a treat.
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