Death Race 2000

(Paul Bartel, USA, 1975)

It is useless trying to definitively backdate postmodern cinema to the year it began – it emerges from many key moments in the post WWII period – but for me, in retrospect, it started the first time I saw Paul Bartel’s Roger Corman-produced B movie Death Race 2000.

This is because, in its own healthily eager, cartoonish and adolescent way, the film announces itself as completely beyond believing, or investing faith in, anything whatsoever.

A character named Frankenstein (David Carradine) is the nominal, ever-sneering anti-hero – with “half a face under that mask” – in a ruthless, completely mediatised future where the principal spectator sport is the running down of people on the road for points. (That last bit of plot info is cleverly held back for the first 15 minutes.)

It’s a broad, Pop Art comedy (William Klein-style) coming at the tail-end of America’s countercultural wave of the 1960s – the script is by Corman stalwarts of the 1950s and ‘60s, Robert Thom and Charles Griffith.

The endless invocation (and, eventually, direct depiction) of the President was par for the satirical course back then, but has undoubtedly gained a renewed frisson during Trump’s second term in office. This movie-President’s invectives against Europe – and especially “the French” – provide extra fun.

All the principal figures are cartoonish caricatures with names like Nero the Hero (Martin Kove) and dim, brutish Machine Gun Joe (Sylvester Stallone in an early, pre-Rocky role, spitting lines including “Some people might think you’re cute, but me I think you’re one very large baked potato”); the audience of fans include a neo-Nazi sector that cheers on their “swastika sweetheart”, Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins), with her boast of a Final Solution to the (car) race.

There’s even a revolutionary “resistance” cell of disgruntled activist-terrorists planning a timely sabotage-subversion (“Operation Anti-Race”) of the whole show – including jamming the broadcast TV signal and replacing it with their propaganda, which I guess counts as a “political cinema” trope in these cult-movie-crazy days of the 2020s. But even these feckless anarchists simply spew, via their elderly mouthpiece Thomasina Paine (Harriet Medine), clichés of pioneer-land ideology.

After all, “winning”, as Frankenstein assures us, “is the only standard of excellence left”. By the same token, he later declares: “I never care” – and his own eventual conversion to the cause of anti-social destruction (“To die is my life’s work!”) anticipates the anarchic cool of Snake Pliskin (Kurt Russell) in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) and Escape from L.A. (1996).

One can marvel endlessly at the ingenuity of the bargain-basement special effects (a painted city matted onto a bit of real sports stadium) and canny locations (all-white underground parking lot as laboratory). For an Australian viewer like myself, Death Race 2000 sits exactly between Peter Weir’s fascinating The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) – Corman reportedly had his own print, and it clearly inspired the gaudily designed ‘death cars’ – and the first Mad Max (1979) instalment by George Miller, which is neo-realistic by comparison.

Paul Bartel (1938-2000) is an intriguing but now unfairly forgotten figure in the annals of independent American cinema. High camp humour and relentless mockery (somewhat more vicious than John Waters) sprayed right across the social board constituted his forte. Between the short A Secret Cinema (1966) and the semi-mainstream Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989) that I fondly recall, he enjoyed a brief moment of nudging-overground-from-the-underground, repertory-circuit notoriety with Eating Raoul (1982) – featuring, as a couple, himself and the wonderful Woronov (today an accomplished writer and artist), who shines here on the track as Calamity Jane Kelly.

Bartel’s approach to action scenes is essentially parodic: it’s a cartoon-diagram in rapid montage (by Tina Hirsch) of looks left or right, spinning wheels, grimacing drivers, zoom shots, fake blood-spurting disembodied limbs, explosions and stunts (a plane is added in the final quarter) – a long way, deliberately, from George Miller-level craft.

Into-camera shouting or drawling race callers take up an awful lot of the running time (as well as the expositional slack). To avoid the repetitiveness of five cars burning down the same road for the duration, the fanciful vehicles (illogically but pleasingly) take different routes (at times) across the USA – but even a geo-untrained eye like mine can see that every exterior is somewhere indistinct in Southern California.

Cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, here at the moment between working on Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) and his distinguished A-film career alongside Jonathan Demme, John Hughes and many others, gives it whatever roughly unifying, warm glow he can.

Incidents along the track include an encounter with a matador; “euthanasia day at the geriatric hospital” (an annual event which Frankenstein détourns); the finnicky tracking and killing of a fisherman in a puddle-pond; a (pre-Baudrillard) simulacrum of a tunnel detour; and a J.G. Ballard-style slaughter of a sacrificial maiden – with absolutely no news crews anywhere in sight, or visible computerised monitoring built into the cars, even as ‘the world is watching’, magically. Such B movie premises are conjured through the free association of fragments, rather than world-building (21st century buzzword) verisimilitude.

A sweet memory from first watching this as a teenager: much is made throughout of Frankenstein’s mythological status as a properly synthetic hero, every part of his body fabricated and stitched together by a team of the finest, most futuristic Swiss doctors/mechanics (the terms are rendered interchangeable). An apt comparison would be not so much RoboCop as the “What, me worry?” hero of Evil Dead II (1982) played by Bruce Campbell, who replaces his severed hand with a chainsaw.

To enhance the legend of the state-of-the-art workmanship of those Swiss doctors, Frankenstein keeps his entire body covered in leather at all times – even when every other competitor is getting a pit-stop, full-body, nude massage. However, here’s the first postmodern twist: that hideously disfigured face is just a mask (as revealed at the 14-minute mark). Eventually, his blonde navigator Annie Smith (Simone Griffeth) gets to see Frankenstein with his complete gear off and – after a sweetly wacky moment of shared dance (Paul Chihara’s music score is incongruously zany throughout) that leads to a discreet fade-out before sex – begins expressing her profound admiration for the work of these brilliant medical-mechanical technicians.

The punchline to all that arrives later. “There are no Swiss doctors”, Frankenstein drawls. “Just native … American … know-how”. (Carradine is super-careful to put a decent pause between native and American in that sentence.) With this immortal gag – even more than in the ultra-satirical reversal-finale – the ironic switchback of postmodernism is complete.

MORE Bartel: Not for Publication

© Adrian Martin July 1983 / August 1988 / February 2025