Roger Corman (1926-2024) spent 70 straight years as an independent filmmaker. In that time, he produced and/or directed well over 500 movies and mentored a murderer’s row of Hollywood directors ranging from Francis Ford Coppola to Ron Howard to James Cameron. He also gave early roles to Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and William Shatner. If you’ve ever seen a movie that was made in America in the last 50 years, it is to some significant extent the product of an environment that Roger Corman helped to create.
That said, even Corman would have probably told you that not too many of his movies are what one might call “good.” Corman specialized in fast, cheap productions that took full advantage of any and every corner he could cut. Most of them were proper B-movies in the original sense of the term, in that they existed to fill schedules and take up space; actual quality was a distant secondary consideration. It’s faster to talk about the movies in Corman’s filmography that are actually still worth watching, and 1975’s Death Race 2000, directed by Paul Bartel (Eating Raoul), sits right at the top of that list. It’s a black comedy about murder as entertainment that’s aged surprisingly well, and it’s available for screening right now via Tubi.
Bread and circuses
Original theatrical poster by John SolieSource: New World Pictures
Death Race 2000 is set 21 years after the “World Crash of ’79,” and America has been rebuilt into a dictatorship. The most popular sport in the country is the Transcontinental Road Race, where drivers in customized muscle cars race across the country for fame and fortune. Anyone they happen to kill along the way, from random bystanders to members of their own pit crew, is worth bonus points towards each racer’s final score.
The returning champion and odds-on favorite in 2000’s race is a man known only as Frankenstein (David Carradine). His competition includes former gangster Machine Gun Joe (a young Sylvester Stallone) and “Calamity” Jane Kelly (Mary Woronov, The Devil’s Rejects), as well as interference from a revolutionary movement that wants to disrupt the race as a strike against the current American dictatorship.
Simone Griffeth and David Carradine in Death Race 2000 (1975)Source: New World Pictures/Everett Collection
That all being said, it almost takes longer to summarize Death Race 2000 than it does to watch it. Despite its weird dystopian setting, large cast of characters, and relatively elaborate concept, Death Race 2000 is only 80 minutes long. It features just enough exposition to get by and spends the rest of its runtime on stunt driving, black comedy, and vehicular homicide. The budget’s low and the concept’s crazy, but it gets by on momentum and adrenaline.
The black comedy is arguably the heart of the piece. Death Race 2000 doesn’t have time to dwell on any single part of its setting, but its scenario is built on a cheerful acceptance of murder that would be chilling if it wasn’t handled so matter-of-factly. Nurses wheel elderly people into the middle of the Race’s path for “Euthanasia Day,” a guy with a matador’s cape deliberately plays chicken with Jane’s car, and fans of the Race choose to sacrifice themselves beneath the drivers’ wheels, all accompanied by running commentary from some of the most vapid TV hosts ever put on film. If it wasn’t ridiculous, it’d be quietly terrifying.
Sylvester Stallone in Death Race 2000 (1975)Source: New World Pictures/Everett Collection
Death Race 2000 wasn’t reviewed well upon release. Gene Siskel called it “the goofiest and sleaziest film I’ve seen in the last five years.” (On the other hand, the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael called it “an ideal drive-in movie.”) Subsequently, video rentals and word of mouth made Death Race 2000 into a cult classic.
That’s led to Death Race 2000 exercising a certain influence over later pop culture, whether you knew it was there or not. Video games like Carmageddon and Twisted Metal obviously copied its homework straight across, but there’s some of Death Race‘s DNA in the next 50 years of murder-as-entertainment dystopian fiction. Wherever there’s a questionable plot about adults forcing teenagers to kill one another in order to amuse the masses, Corman’s Death Race is there in spirit.
Corman himself eventually made a sequel, 2017’s Death Race 2050, that’s nowhere near as famous as the original. There’s also a 2008 remake by Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil), which stars Jason Statham and got three sequels. These are all watchable in a schlocky sort of way, but they don’t have the 1975 original’s staying power.
Some of Death Race 2000’s jokes have faded in relevance over time — the TV hosts in particular come off as if they’re parodies of public figures that have since ceased to be relevant, like the guy who appears to be doing an SNL-tier Walter Cronkite impression — but a few could’ve been written yesterday to mock TikTok stunts and reality TV. It’s worth every second of its 80-minute runtime. Check it out.
Death Race 2000 is available to stream for free on Tubi.