Death Race 2000 (1975) - AIP's dystopic car smash

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The totally awesome poster for Paul Bartel's Death Race 2000

QUICK REVIEW:

In the year 2000, the US has become a semi-Nazi police state, where the greatest sports heroes are called Frankenstein and Machine Gun Joe, who compete at who can kill the most people in the Death Race.

Death Race 2000 is written by Robert Thoms (Crazy Mama (1975)) and Charles B. Griffiths (The Wild Angels (1966)), who wrote the finished shooting script. It is based on the short story The Racer by the recently passed Ib Melchior (The Angry Red Planet (1959)). It boasts an original idea for a car sci-fi action movie, which is well-executed here by director Paul Bartel (Carquake (1976)).
Producer Roger Corman (The Terror Within (1989)) is in his element behind this kind of film, and David Carradine (Kung Fu (1972)) is perfect in the role as the killing machine Frankenstein, while his soon-to-be superstar co-actor Sylvester Stallone (Stop! Or Mom Will Shoot (1992)) mostly just yells ugly things.
The effects are fun, and the film is morally indefensible as entertainment for its core audience, young people, which is the case for most of the edgy 70s exploitation flicks. Death Race 2000 rocks!

Cost: 0.3-0.53 mil. $
Box office: 5-8 mil. $
= Huge hit
[The shoot had been plagued by script problems, bad weather, a stressed-out star (Carradine) and big time restraints due to the low budget. Death Race 2000 became one of Corman's American International Pictures' biggest successes.  They made a comic book series based on it in the 90s, and it was remade in 2008, (a much inferior film.) Carradine was paid 10 % of the gross, which AIP only did with him and Ron Howard. Roger Ebert changed his opinion about the film, from his original zero-star review, to later calling it part of "a great tradition of summer drive-in movies". The film is fresh at 85 % on Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Death Race 2000?