It isn’t often I find myself in direct opposition to an opinion Roger Ebert expressed in a review, yet I am stunned by how much he hated 1975’s Death Race 2000.
I will sum up the plot for the unfamiliar. In the future (well, 2000 was the future in 1975), America is under the thumb of a totalitarian regime. To distract from its many woes, the government stages a violent cross-country car race each year.
I’m a little unclear on the rules of the race, even after seeing it twice. I know there are points given to the drivers for running over pedestrians, and those points vary by different classifications. What I never fully grasped was how those points factor into the decision of who wins the race. If somebody crosses the finish line first, but does not incur any casualties, have they still won? Or can somebody with the most points cross the line last and still be the winner?
That kind of thing would bother me in most films, but not here. This is a picture that realizes how silly it is and it knows you know how silly it is. Basically, this is a live-action cartoon for adults.
Consider the scene where David Carridine, as one of the drivers, sees the staff of a hospital in the distance as they leave wheelchair-bound old people in the road. He tells his navigator in the passenger seat (Simone Griffeth) this is “euthanasia day” at the hospitals, where they help boost his point total while getting rid of their dead weight. He instead goes off road and runs over all those doctors and nurses. Thing is, all we see is the bodies bouncing into the air as if they are in a Tex Avery cartoon.
Ebert’s specific beef with the film was the extent of the violence in it. What I found odd is the movie isn’t that violent, even when compared to many other R rated films released that same year. The crux of his review is how appalled he was to see the auditorium full of children who were laughing and carrying on. That little kids were at a movie with this rating seems to me the fault of many people, none of whom made this picture.
Admittedly, the violence is more gruesomely portrayed when the other drivers wipe out pedestrians. There is an especially nasty moment where a driver played by Sylvester Stallone runs a guy down in a muddy riverbed and blood sprays out in torrents from under the spinning wheels. But Stallone is portrayed as one of the bad guys.
Also, I doubt we’re supposed to find that moment funny, unlike the scene with Carradine at the hospital. I would be appalled if I was in a theatre with a bunch of pre-pubescents laughing at the more gruesome scene but, once again, it is not the fault of the filmmakers they were admitted to the screening.
This dark comedy was directed by Paul Bartel, and it is in a similar vein to the other films he would later make, most notably Eating Raoul. That film is in the Criterion Collection. Honestly, I like this movie far more.
I was surprised by how good the movie looks, given the producer is legendary spendthrift Roger Corman. Each race vehicle has a distinctive appearance. There’s good use of matte paintings in the stadium scenes. It doesn’t exactly feel like a fully-realized future world, but I still found it more believable than…well, Futureworld.
The movie makes numerous points about violence and how Americans are addicted to it. Of course, this point is made in a rather violent movie, which makes that seem a tad hypocritical. Then there’s a moment at the very end that answers a question about violence with more violence. This is a film that calls bullshit on its own attempt to take the high road. Maybe being on that road only makes you a more likely target for the drivers.
Perhaps Ebert missed the tongue-in-cheek nature of the humor in Death Race 2000.
Maybe he just didn’t care. I can totally understand being appalled by the behavior of the children in the audience when he saw it, but they shouldn’t have been there, anyway. This is a movie where a character has a literal hand grenade—they can detach it from their body and use it as a grenade. And there is another character who is dispatched in a way I have only previously seen in Road Runner cartoons. Maybe this is a kids’ movie after all. It was just made for bigger kids.
Dir: Paul Bartel
Starring David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone
Watched on Signal One blu-ray (region B)