what do you thing about this classic from 1975 with a very young Stallone in one of the roles ?
I think it’s one if the weirdest movies that I have ever seen. Brutal sci-fi-action, but very weird.
I’ve hard that someone are planing to remake it, with Stallone in one of the roles.
Ah, Death Race 2000, the movie that inspired Roger Corman to make DeathSport with David Carradine in a post-apocalyptic future where people ‘joust’ on motorcycles in an arena of the damned.
It’s one of my favorite awful flicks.
DR2000 also inspired on my favorite games… Carmageddon!
Death Race 2000 also inspired the first “controversial” video game, also called Death Race 2000. You would drive around and try to run over “zombies”. when you hit one, a headstone would pop up.
There were protests and everything.
One of my favorite segments is when Carradine’s character steers his car behind the hedges that line the road in front of an old folk’s home. The doctors and nurses had put all the residents out in the street, hoping to tempt the drivers to come their way for the extra points running down a senior citizen would get them. But Carradine sent them flying instead, causing the official race commentators to speculate on why he did it.
I love the deadpan dialogue of that scene.
Navigator, seeing doctors arranging gurneys in the middle of the highway: “What is that?”
Carradine: “Euthenasia day at the geriatrics hospital.”
Best. Movie. Ever
Where else would you find such great lines as…
Stallone: “You think your cute, but to me your just one very large baked potato.” WTF is this suppose to mean anyway.
Stallone: “I do this in the name of hate!”
/David Carradine shows woman a grenade shaped as a prosthetic hand.
Woman: “Is that a grenade?”
Carradine (completely deadpan look): “A hand grenade.”
Leslie McRay: “You should have gone after that boy scout camp like I said!”
Martin Kove: “I tried the goddamn boy scout camp. You know how fast those boy scouts move?”
Then there was the guy that managed to dodge Stallone by jumping into a nearby creek. He stands there and points and laughs at the car. Stallone proceeds to drive off the road, down the hill, over the bushes, and through the middle of the water just to run him over.
Who knew you could run over your own pit crew for points?
How about that scoring system? Teenagers were worth more points then normal, kids under 12 were worth more then teenagers :D, and elderly were worth a whopping 100 points!
My friends and I use to spend nights just laughing our asses off watching this film. If they were to make a remake today it wouldn’t be nearly as good. They wouldn’t be able to get away with all the unPC material which made the original so great.
I always had a bit of a crush on Corman regular Roberta Collins, aka ‘Mathilda the Hun’ ;).
“If they scatter, go for the baby!”
“JESUS CHRYSLER!!”
“HIT THE BABY ! HIT THE BABY!!!”
I love the scene where the protesters have a fake baby carraige with a bomb attached!
Ever notice how, in a race involving landmines, ingenious detour signs, and airplanes dropping bombs, everyone always wears a helmet?
This one yes, and the scene where this guy jumps on a manhole cover and get hit by one the cars.
This is a great film, and for once one I would like to see remade with modern technology. For me the only problem with DR2000 was that the roads were nearly deserted throughout. A few CGI vehicles, and modern stunt co-ordination as seen in Matrix 2 would just make it all the more spicy a film.
Watched the last half yet again this morning on AMC. Still a guilty pleasure favorite for its black comedy satire premise, hammy acting, and its funky take on the future shot on the cheap.
So cheap, so cheesy, so deadpan, so unsubtle, but there’s something almost hypnotic about it. Even the soundtrack music seems like it shouldn’t fit, but does. I still get a strange twinge of sadness when Matilda’s car goes through the fake tunnel, and over the cliff, mostly due to the music.
I know it’s been along time since I’ve seen it uncut, but I’m surprised how tame the actual violence is. Yeah, they’re running down people for points, but then so little is shown since there seems to have been so little of an effects budget. I mean they get around showing Frankenstein’s missing “hand” after he uses it, by having Carradine keep his right arm out of the shot as much as possible.
The problem with remaking it, what major studio would commit to the same kind of black humored tone built around a race where you get points for running down innocent people in a film that never takes itself seriously? The kind of money needed for big stunts or CGI might work against a remake, beside imagine the media uproar, and how “culture war” finger waggers like William Bennett and Bill O’Reilly would get up on their soapboxes over such a film now. What studio would risk the lawsuits that would result from idiot teens trying to imitate the film, like all those morons copying Jackass stunts among others.
OTOH, let Takeski Miike direct, and hire every HK stuntman and driver you can find and I’ll be the first in line.
The saga does continue.
An eight issue comic book series titled Death Race 2020, continues the story.
Not if I get there first
I haven’t seen this movie in probably 20 years, but I do remember it being very, very funny so now I’ve got to go hunting around the internet to find a copy
there was also a sequel to this movie. Death Sport from 1978
anyone seen that one ?
one of my favorite bad movies. Stallone was cool!
MST3K fact: 2 of the actresses in this film were in Girl in Gold Boots!
Oh yes, this film is extremely funny! Watched it last week, with my graphic design course. And I tell you, the title sequence is something else - drawings that look like they were lifted from some talentless highschooler’s notes from a boring biology lesson and then colored in with magic markers.
I like the part where Frankenstein (Carradine) runs over a race official that has just blessed the cars. He’s supposedly ‘Pope (or High Priest?) of the Bi-Partisan Church’.
And what’s with the artillery on Mathilda’s car? It looks like some sort of heavy cannon - but neither she nor Machinegun Joe (whose car is fitted with oversize tommyguns, obviously) never fire a shot. In stead they try to run the others off the road. WTF?