Cars with knives on the grille! Nazi chicks in naked catfights! Splosions! Sly Stallone and David Carradine in a punch-up! Gratuitous boobs! It’s a perfectly shameless feast for the id, without sacrificing its sly sense of humor.Ī very young and then-unknown Sylvester Stallone is a tightly wound ball of charisma as the gangster-themed driver “Machine Gun” Joe Viterbo, whose fragile ego can’t stand coming in second to the fame of Frankenstein. Though it does manage to comment on American culture (specifically the media-much of the film is framed as breathless “newscasts” of the race, with an obnoxious blowhard announcer a wheedling, smarmy interviewer and a droning “serious reporter”), Death Race 2000 is a parade of awesome from beginning to end. I hope this doesn’t make it sound like Death Race 2000 is some sort of B-movie attempt at political drama or high-minded satire. After long scenes of well-maintained sexual tension, Frankenstein and Annie team up to defeat the other racers, elude the misguided rebel attacks, and assassinate the leader of the un-free world. His only prosthetic is his hand, embedded with an explosive (“A hand grenade,” Carradine deadpans) he intends to use to kill the president. Carradine is merely the latest actor to play him. As Annie discovers when she hesitantly removes his mask, “Frankenstein” is not a stitched-together monster at all, but a character constructed by the government to act as a national hero. Doing the “enigmatic badass” role he always played so flawlessly, David Carradine (RIP) turns out to hate the president as much as the resistance does. (Only the winner of the race gets to shake hands with the president.) But Frankenstein isn’t what he seems. The resistance intends to sabotage Frankenstein and replace him with a double who will give their demands to the Dear Leader. She’s the granddaughter of Thomasina Paine, leader of the underground resistance that wishes to shut down the race and challenge Mr. His new “navigator,” a perky blonde who isn’t afraid to do a number of long, lingering scenes with no top on, is actually a double-agent. Frankenstein is a national hero - a superhero, really - with a disguise and a cape and a kickass car.
He spends much of the film in a full leather costume and mask. According to legend, most of his body parts, including much of his face, were blown off in previous accidents and reattached in cyborg form. The results are hilariously satisfying.ĭavid Carradine plays “Frankenstein,” the only competitor to have survived - and won - a previous Transcontinental race. It’s a real-world version of that “100 points!” game everyone played as teenagers when an old lady wandered into the crosswalk. The nation’s distraction comes in the form of the Transcontinental Road Race, in which racers compete not only to be first from New York to “New L.A.,” but also to score the most “points” by running over hapless pedestrians. President” making pronouncements from his smoke-machine-equipped propaganda room. The now-combined political parties and a vague church authority rule the land remotely, with the Kim Jong-Il-like “Mr. In the year 2000, the United States has suffered an economic and political collapse. But just as Annie ducks and screams, Frankenstein makes a sharp left and, instead of “euthanizing” the old people, plows through the watching crowd of hospital staffers, white coats and nurse’s uniforms flying like so many bowling pins. “Euthanasia Day at the geriatric home,” Frankenstein mutters. “What is that?” asks Annie Paine, navigator to the legendary race-car driver Frankenstein, as nurses and doctors set wheelchair-bound elderly people in the middle of the road, right in the path of their speeding car.