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Page 1 of 2 A few days ago I was treated to a free, private screening of Death Race.* Finally, a little respect for the kid. And now you get to read about it. See? Everybody wins.
First off, for the lurkers who wouldn’t think to click past the read more link, a synopsis: Paul WS Anderson’s Death Race update is neither a campy, exploitation classic like its predecessor, nor a worthless pusillanimous remake. Instead, it is a serviceable car crash movie, with perhaps more gore than normally associated with such. Plus, you see Jason Statham’s ass. All in all, not too shabby for a matinee ticket price, and certainly worth a round of Netflix, when the time comes.
Okay, so, if you are reading this, you have gone beyond the pale, or beyond the link in this case, and I applaud and appreciate you. And for your trouble, you get a dose of my full frontal geekery. Which, alas, is not nearly as thigh-sweating as The Transporter’s chiseled butt-cheeks. But I digress.
The first thing we need to talk about is the remake issue. This one seemed to have caused less of a stir than other recent genre remakes amongst the cinephile intelligentsia, or perhaps it did and I am just out of the loop. Either way, it excited me when I saw the previews. Jason Statham, murderous inmates, sexy ladies and machine-shopped muscle cars, what could go wrong? As it turns out, several things. But first, a rant:
Most of the press surrounding this film refers to it as a remake of the Roger Corman film Death Race 2000. This is a specious statement. Yes, Roger Corman is a very important man to independent and exploitation cinema dating back to the fifties, who still has a reverberating effect today, and yes he gave many of our most beloved filmmakers their start, but I would feel remiss in not pointing out that he did not direct DT2000, he produced it. The directing honors fell to the late Paul Bartel. You may think you don’t know him, but you do. As well as DR2000 and its pseudo-follow up Cannonball!, he directed Lust in the Dust and the cult classic Eating Raoul (as well as starring in it), a film that Corman refused to fund, incidentally, and which Bartel’s parents funded by selling their house, and was shot over the course of a year, almost entirely over weekends. And if you still need a visual, he was the weirdo bald teacher in Rock and Roll High School. But I digress. Again. In the remake, which makes the odd decision to be set only four years in the future (especially confusing when the original working title was Death Race 3000), America has suffered a near complete financial collapse, and the unemployment rate is at an all-time high. To that end, naturally, the prison system becomes crowded to capacity, and ultimately falls under the control of corporations. CEOs are now wardens, and a corporation, by definition needs to make money. Hand over fist if at all possible. Follow that to its logical conclusion, and you have the Death Race pay-per-view television show, where inmates race each other to the death for a chance to win their freedom. Win five times, and you get your release papers (I bet some of you more cynical motherfuckers out there doubt the honesty of the wardens).
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