Year: 2017
Runtime: 90 min
Director: G. J. Echternkamp
Starring: Manu Bennett, Marci Miller, Burt Grinstead, Malcolm McDowell, Folake Olowofoyeku, Yancy Butler, Anessa Ramsey.
Many low budget auteurs have come and gone in the wonderful history of cinema. Few have the staying power to last a decade or more, often coming in hot, like a meteor in some god-awful disaster movie from the late 1990s, and then burning up to a fine ash. But occasionally, you have one or two who stand tall amid their peers, men like Jim Wynorski or Charles Band, or even the venerable Lloyd Kaufman. But there is one gold standard which all B-movie devotees direct their longing gaze, and that is the mighty Roger Corman.
And one of those defining Corman films was the seminal Death Race 2000, a historically accurate retelling of the great Death Race that so captivated this nation back in the misty past of the year 2000. And though we got a remake and numerous sequels to said remake, we never got a true sequel to the pedestrian-crunching black comedy.
Until now.
Directed by G.J. Echternkamp and produced by the prolific legend himself, this movie serves as a soft reboot of the original Death Race 2000, unlike the more firm remake with Jason Statham from 2008. This movie doesn’t change the general plot like that first redo—it’s still a cross-country race with points scored for competitors taken out and pedestrians run over, all in a dystopian future where there is 99% unemployment and the world is ruled by Malcolm McDowell playing a subtle, delicate mockup of a very real political figure. The movie is loaded with bombastic split-screens and hyped up announcers gleefully tallying up kills for the home audience.
The entire film is pretty much that in a nutshell.
It is loud, relentlessly crude, dementedly violent, and opts for broad parody strokes as opposed to anything more clever. Gosh, isn’t capitalism just the worst? Golly, don’t Americans adore their violent athletes? Jeepers, isn’t the rise of a tech obsessed, entertainment-driven society poised for a massive collapse?
Expect the same level of subtle with the characters in the movie, starting with Manu Bennett’s Frankenstein, a racer put together as half-man-half-machine. Then we have the black rap star adorned with golden spikes on her shoulders and a mic in her fist, played by Folake Olowofoyeku, who has a song charmingly titled “Drive, Drive, Drive, Kill, Kill”, and her main opponent, Tammy the Terrorist, played by a manic Anessa Ramsey. She’s an ultra right-wing religious nut who spouts off sermons about KFC and Elvis Presley as her devoted followers happily commit vehicular suicide to earn their way to whatever passes for heaven in Tammy-land. Again, enjoy the subtle undertones the movie presents.
Of course, the party wouldn’t be complete without Jed Perfectus, a roided up monstrosity of a racer who insists on ripping his shirt off and bellowing macho threats to compensate for his repressed homosexual urges. This is not me being snarky, that is literally his entire character, portrayed by Burt Grinstead with as much moxie as he can manage. Offensive? Maybe, yeah, but also completely in line with the rest of the madness.
The whole shebang is one loud party, with dismemberments, CG blood spurting all over the place like this is an Asylum production, random breasts flashed about to remind us that there is more to life than just senseless carnage, and endless jokes, most of them in poor taste. You ever want to see an AI car go on a rampage while sexually pleasuring its female copilot and then losing its mind and searching for the meaning to life? If you said yes, have I got a film for you!
In fact, though I might shake my head at some of the bad jokes and crass attitude of the film, it’s delivered with a very rapid pace (like, say, a race) and even with the dated humor (bad gay jokes in 2017? Really?) it has a weird anarchic attitude where I can’t be angry with it for very long. I mean, yes, clearly it knows it is in bad taste and it revels in it, much like South Park, but unlike that long-running animated series Death Race 2050 doesn’t try to moralize.
This is a race between cartoon men in cartoon cars that look like they would fall apart if they exceeded thirty-miles-per-hour. There are no attempts to suggest solutions to the societal dilemmas the movie presents, just a stream of jokes at humanity’s expense. And actually, that’s probably for the best. After all, do we really want a movie that is about sanctioned pedestrian massacres to provide us helpful tips to becoming a better world?
Uh, yeah, gonna go with a solid “No” on that one.
So is the movie only going to appeal to crude humor junkies who think we’re all too PC? Well I’m not a big anti-PC whiner and even I found myself chuckling along at the absurdity of each preposterous scene, and I think the movie is a reasonable slice of harmless low-budget fun. It’s a throwback to an earlier time in movie-making, when the goal was to shock with lurid scenes of titillation and violence. And that makes it something of a dinosaur, but it’s also an anarchic guilty pleasure.
The cheap thrills are fun and the actors work the tongue-in-cheek nature of the movie pretty well, with brief appearances from genre stalwarts like McDowell and Yancy Butler to provide us with maximum cheese. The only downside to the low-budget shenanigans would be that some of the effects are just awful. Like, I don’t mean a little hokey, I mean full-on first-time student with a copy of Adobe After Effects bad. But no one goes into a movie called Deathrace expecting the next Michael Bay explosion-fest, so I can’t really complain just because some of the racing looks like toy cars in a kid’s sandbox.
Very few filmmakers could approach this material and come out the other side without looking like a heinous monster. People like Uwe Boll have tried and they just end up out-of-touch and absurdly angry. This isn’t just angry—sure, it’s mad at our society for being so damn stupid, but it’s not just a loud, mean-spirited rush of gore and death. It knows we aren’t going to learn from our mistakes and that allows it to be snarky instead of self-righteous, because how the heck is a movie about violent road races going to change our world for the better?
It can’t, so instead of preaching, Death Race 2050 just leans onto the gas pedal and cracks jokes at the world’s expense.
It feels somehow appropriate for a Death Race movie to finally come full circle and return to the dark humor of its roots. This isn’t meant to please all audiences, and even some fans of the original might be turned off at the excessive carnage and gross humor, but it definitely has the spirit necessary to lift a middle finger to safe, audience-friendly affairs like The Fast and The Furious franchise.
