The Screengrab : death race 2000

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964)

In John Waters’ book Shock Value, Herschell Gordon Lewis explains that he became the Godfather of Gore somewhat by accident after ordering too much stage blood for a movie called Living Venus. By spilling most of his surplus in 1963’s exploitation classic Blood Feast, Lewis was responsible for the birth of the splatter/torture porn genre: “It doesn’t sound like much of an achievement,” he admits to Waters, “but we were the first with that kind of nonsense.” Yet while Blood Feast is, in its way, historic, I don’t remember too much about it beyond Mal Arnold’s spooky performance as Fuad Ramses, the world’s worst caterer. Also, I’m pretty sure there was a de-tonguing at some point. I saw Lewis' Two Thousand Maniacs around the same number of years ago, but for some reason the latter movie's vengeful but otherwise good-natured redneck killers are still vivid in my thoughts, partly because the movie’s theme song is so durn catchy, but mostly because its Down Home Brigadoon plot about ghostly Confederate citizens returning to life every hundred years to slaughter luckless Yankees haunts my thoughts every time my Northern ass crosses South of the Mason-Dixon Line (and, indeed, I’ve got my strategy all worked out if undead hillbillies ever stick me in their iron maiden-esque nail barrel and roll me down a hill)...though I’m still not entirely sure how Natalie Merchant figures into the equation.

TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE (1971)

The Italian horror director Mario Bava is associated with the atmospheric diabolism and haunted crypts of such films as Black Sunday (1960), but with this contemporary murder mystery he, too, helped to create the slasher genre. This in itself is not the kind of accomplishment that gets you a Congressional Medal of Honor, but Bava's film (which is also known under the title Bay of Blood, among many others) shows just how stylish and entertaining a body count movie can be. It also demonstrates how impossibly convoluted the plot of a gory carny ride can get. But the sick joke ending is worth all the confusion experienced on the way there.

DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)

Movies are a collaborative art. That's worth keeping in mind even with regard to movies that don't often get mentioned in the same breath as the "A"-word, such as this Roger Corman production, a cheeky, low-budget variation on the violent-sports-as-metaphor-for-a-disintegrating-society idea that was treated with bloated solemnity in the big-budget Rollerball. Much of the cheekiness comes from the director Paul Bartel, whose other films (Eating Raoul, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) showed him to be a man with an eccentric, campy wit. They also showed that he had a tendency to concentrate more on keeping himself amused on the set than delivering a movie that could actually hold someone's attention from beginning to end. Bartel thought that Corman ruined this sci-fi satire, about a futuristic, government-sponsored auto race in which the contestants rack up points for the number of people they run over, by filling it with reshot bloody inserts to make it more violent, but Corman apparently thought that Bartel's cut was too toothlessly whimsical for its intended audience. Given the track records of both men, Corman's viewpoint must be respected, but the fact is that Bartel's goofy sense of humor helps to account for this movie's standing as one of the more enduringly enjoyable products ever to roll off the Corman assembly line. It also captures David Carradine, who plays the star racer Frankenstein, in his charismatic B-movie star prime, and Sylvester Stallone, as his thuggish, clam sauce-smeared rival, in the closest thing he ever had to a prime.

ROBOT MONSTER (1953)

One of the most persistent fictions about grade-Z exploitation cheapies like this deranged Phil Tucker anti-classic is that they’re exciting. Sure, they may not be artsy like some fancy-pants European auteur crap, goes the argument, but at least they give you a lot of bang for your buck. Well, if you were foolish enough to pay a buck for Robot Monster, you would find it entirely bangless. For a story that involves a sinister alien menace – well, okay, a lumbering extra in a diving helmet and an ape suit – eradicating the entire human race except for one family, the movie contains exactly zero thrills and chills. Ro-Man spends around 43 minutes blundering around the San Fernando Valley chasing after a handful of people who don’t seem all that concerned with having to rebuild the human race, and puts the lie to the notion that these movies could at least do action right. So who cares? Well, you will, sort of. Robot Monster is one of those movies that manages to rise below its incompetence, coming across as so much worse than it has any right to be, even with its fifty-dollar budget: it clearly would have been awful with ten million to spend. Like the oeuvre of Ed Wood, its appeal comes not from being good on any level, but from being so bad that you can’t believe it was actually made. Once Ro-Man starts blabbering about the existential crisis he’s having for no particular reason after having killed three billion people, asking at what point on the graph must and cannot meet, you just shrug and let yourself go along for the ride. You sure as hell aren’t in the presence of greatness, but you’re in the presence of a sort of transcendent badness, and, well, that’s something.

PSYCHO (1960)

Psycho might seem to be an odd fit for a list like this, what with its being an acknowledged classic by a major Hollywood director. Obviously, it's very different from the run of exploitation films. Except that it's conceived as a choice specimen of the form, right down to its toes. Hitchcock was just coming off the lavish production North by Northwest, and the idea of doing a quick, down-and-dirty low budget movie must have appealed to him on a number of levels. But he had also been reading Variety and examining the box office returns of the new independent thriller producers such as William Castle and Roger Corman, and some perverse streak of vanity in him might have compelled him to show that, even though he'd become rich and world famous, he could still grab an audience by the short hairs as well as any punk with a Bolex. After he began to explore the idea of adapting Robert Bloch's novel about a killer based on Ed Gein, his studio, Paramount, helped point him in the right direction by refusing to make the movie because it judged the material to be "repulsive." So Hitchcock funded it through his own company and made it on the Universal lot using the regular crew from his TV series. Hitchcock had also used his TV show to develop a public image as a poker-faced ghoulish comedian, and when the movie was ready for market, he extended that role into a performance as a Castle-like showman, which enabled him to signal to his audience what kind of movie to expect while mostly avoiding spelling out plot points that would have killed the movie's surprises. The movie itself features details, such as the opening scene with Janet Leigh and John Gavin lounging around their motel room in their underwear, that for audiences marked it as part of the exploitation genre, which served the dual purpose of making it seem more "modern" that Hitchcock's lavish, color, big-studio implausibilities and making viewers feel that they knew where they were, the better for Hitchcock to pull the rug out from under them. For Hitchcock, making his version of a cutthroat horror film on the (relative) cheap must have been a kind of intellectual experiment, like making a movie within the confines of a lifeboat or filming Rope in a series of continuous ten-minute shots. Hitchcock would later toy with the idea of making a movie in the streets with hand-held cameras, in imitation of the French New Wave, but instead, for the rest of his career he kept to his big-studio, big-budget methods, with mostly diminishing returns.

SEE! the psychedelic frenzy of Part One! FEEL! the erotic madness of Part Two! TOUCH! the tantalizing terror of Part Three! TASTE! the demonic broth of Part Four! SMELL! the far-out funk of Part Five!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Vintage Trailer Review: The REAL Death Race 2000 (1975, Paul Bartel)

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Now that you’ve got the taste of the shitty big-budget in-name-only remake festering in your moviegoing mouths, let’s talk the real Death Race 2000, with all the violence and sleazeball goodness you love from Bartel, Corman & Co. It’s got a post-Caine Carradine, a pre-Rocky Stallone, and of course, The Real Don Steele. Not to mention plenty of vehicular mayhem and a high body count. Pretty much anything you could ask for from a dystopian car picture. If you haven’t seen it, what are you waiting for? The trailer, you say? Ask and you shall receive. Enjoy!

Trailer Review: Death Race

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

OK, so it’s called Death Race, and the characters utter the phrase “Death Race.” But this just doesn’t feel like Death Race to me. First off, the race is all wrong. Quick- what’s the first thing people generally remember about the original Death Race 2000? Chances are it’s the fact that racers get points for running over innocent bystanders. Yet for some reason Paul Not Thomas Anderson and the producers of the film decided to put the film on a closed course. Now, where’s the fun in that? It’s just a demolition derby with added firepower. Practically the only novelty in the remake is the casting of Joan Allen as the villain- sort of surprising to see Hollywood making a woman the baddie in a testosterone-laden guy’s flick. But if that’s all the original ideas you can bring to the table (while taking away just about everything that made the original movie unique) then there’s really no reason to check out the movie. You didn’t need me to tell you this, but I’ll do it anyway- rent the Carradine/Stallone version instead.

"Eating Raoul"'s Mary Woronov: Still Here, Still Hungry

Phil Nugent — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Peter Sobczynski at Hollywood Bitchslap checks in with the towering Mary Woronov as the inimitable cult queen prepares to spend the weekend in Chicago, at retrospective screenings of a couple of her drive-in classics, Rock 'n' Roll High School (at the Music Box Theatre on May 9, with music critics Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot) and, on May 10, Death Race 2000, as part of the annual Sci Fi Spectacular. Woronov entered movies through the side door after working with "the Theatre of the Ridiculous in New York, which was majorly cult--it was hardly Broadway theater or even off-Broadway," and then with Andy Warhol, which led to her getting a show-stopping role in the breakout Warhol factory picture The Chelsea Girls. For much of her movie career, Woronov seemed joined at either hip to the late Paul Bartel, who directed her in Death Race 2000 and co-starred with her in Rock 'n' Roll High School, and Roger Corman, on whose nickel both pictures were made. (She also appeared in the Corman productions Hollywood Boulevard and Cannonball, a follow-up to Death Race 2000, which she describes as "just the worst movie" and which she says inspires this outburst from Bartel, who directed it: "What is happening to me? I don�t like cars--I hate cars!�") and acted for Bartel in such labors of love as Eating Raoul and Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.) As she explains it now, it was a natural fit in both cases because Bartel "really liked camp acting and that was really who I was, a camp actress," and because Corman "didn't care as long as the movie got made." Which in many ways makes him the producer of many a film crew's dreams.

By the way, about her and Bartel? "I was not married to him." Apparently this is a misconception that has come up fairly often in Woronov's experience, even if to some of is it does sound a little like Liberace being besieged with people asking when he was going to meet a nice girl and settle down. Apparently the sexless but loving relationship between their characters in Eating Raoul--"Paul and Mary Bland"--grew out of people's perceptions of them as a couple, which in turn grew out of their being teamed in so many Corman movies directed by other people, who felt the two were simpatico. Her role also grew out of her fear that, after her Nazi-dominatrix-style school principal in Rock 'n' Roll High School, she'd be typecast forever in "reeling bitch" parts. Eating Raoul, which, she says, was shot "in 28 days" over the course of year--Bartel would shoot until he ran out of money and then "would call me months later and go, 'You know that scene--we can shoot it now' "--gave her chance to show that she could flash a friendly smile to go with her mile-long gams, albeit while beating people to death with a skillet. In between such dream jobs, Woronov kept busy with work in such films as Hell Hole, in which "I run this asylum that has nothing but big-titted girls in sneakers." She's slowed down in recent years--the last time we saw her was in Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action, where she brightened up the boardroom as Acme Vice-President in Charge of Bad Ideas. But the good stuff stays good. Or as she puts it, her movies "are so weird that they don't age."

In Other Blogs: The Armond White Vendetta

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:45:00 GMT

This week finds the movie blogosphere all hot and bothered over New York Press critic Armond White’s latest jeremiad, “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Movies.” (If you’re not familiar with Mr. White’s bomb-throwing rhetorical strategies and absurdly contrarian taste in movies, please don your flame-retardant suit before reading.) Among other things, White is concerned that the internet is overrun with know-nothing idiots blathering about film, and of course, we resemble that remark. Glenn Kenny, for one, has had enough. "My friend (well, he was my friend, and then he does this) Aaron Aradillas points me to New York Press critic Armond White's latest 'everybody in the world sucks but me' screed, ‘What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Movies,’ which he kicks off by flexing his disdain for the ‘opinionated throng’ of internet critics who emulate the ‘Vachel Lindsay-Manny Farber tradition.’ That's a great start, given that only a person who has read either Farber, or Lindsay, but by no means both, could possibly conceive of yoking the two together in this way. White then goes on to piss all over the recently-grievously-ailing Roger Ebert...after which he wishes him ‘nothing but health.’ That's awfully sweet of him…Now, White's known for spewing bile at his peers in print, and then turning around and being quite affable to said peers in person—I've experienced it. And I've had it. So: screw you, Armond. Don't say ‘hi’ next time you see me at a screening because you won't get a 'hi' back. You think you're applying some form of moral rigor to your work, but the fact is that you're a bully and a hypocrite, and I don't want to know you.”

At Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells doesn’t take it so personally. In fact, he’s quite the White fan. “Nobody in the world -- nobody -- throws brilliant, super-analytical lightning bolts from his own incredibly fickle and ferocious orbit like New York Press critic Armond White. Judgment! Judgment! He's immensely readable, fearless, provocative. Film criticism today would be in a much poorer and less observant state without him. But he's so alone now. He's so up there and out there that he's barely seems to be breathing the same common air or standing on any kind of recognizable terra firma….Only White can say stuff that I find almost appalling (but always amusing) in its hermetic and secluded considerations, but at the same make points that I know deep down to be true, or at least worthy of serious consideration.”

Living in Cinema has a more or less even-handed take on the whole situation. “I don’t much care for Armond White and I know he wouldn’t much care for me if he knew I existed, but sometimes the man has a point….Print criticism, in part because of its for-profit nature and in part because of its cozy relationship with the very thing it would criticize, is largely a failure. It’s a monolithic dinosaur that is on the verge of extinction and I say ‘good riddance.’ I also agree that much of what has rushed to fill the void via the Internet is garbage. For starters, there is too much emphasis on box office figures….There is also, I suppose, a necessarily watered down quality to the overwhelming mass of Internet movie reporting. There are too many of us doing this and many of us kind of suck.”

Elsewhere in the worldwide web of suck, Beyond the Multiplex takes a look at the Tribeca Film Festival and wonders exactly what it’s supposed to be. “I never know quite what to say about the Tribeca Film Festival, which launched its 2008 edition on Wednesday night with the premiere of the Tina Fey-Amy Poehler comedy Baby Mama. Maybe that's because the festival's reason for existing has never seemed entirely clear. How do Baby Mama and the Wachowski siblings' Speed Racer, this year's Hollywoodized red-carpet premieres, fit into a festival that encompasses sports movies, experimental New York documentaries, unknown art films from Eastern Europe and the Arab world, and a collection of would-be art-house hits vacuumed up from other festivals? Maybe it's a dumb question. Those things stick together because they're all part of a large, diverse and incoherent film festival that clogs up Manhattan during the very nicest spring weather and fleetingly captures the industry's attention before all the film-biz bigwigs jet off to Cannes.”

And finally, from the “wish we could be there” department, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule has the scoop on the Southern California Drive-In Movie Society’s celebration of the 75th anniversary of the drive-in theater. “The Mission Tiki Drive-in has the Punk Rock Drive-in outdoor festival scheduled monthly through September, as well as its second all-day-and- into-the-night Tiki Invasion II, featuring 10 different bands, a burlesque revue, a hot rod car show and a great opportunity to see genuine drive-in movie classics like Death Race 2000, Zombie and Invasion of the Bee Girls on the giant outdoor screen, just like God intended. The Mission Tiki also has what promises to be a great all-night Monsterama Halloween horror movie festival scheduled for October…But this weekend it's all happening at the Vineland Drive-in in City of Industry, where the Southern California Drive-in Movie Society will kick off its fourth season in celebration of the 75th anniversary of drive-in history with this summer’s first Drive-in Tailgate Party.”

Stallone All Juiced to Play Rambo Again

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

In an interview with Time magazine, Sylvester Stallone has admitted to taking human growth hormone (HGH) as part of the regimen that made it possible for him to once again play the mush-mouthed super-warrior John Rambo for a fourth time. Actually, "admitted" doesn't really capture the tone of Sly's remarks. The 61-year-old "actor", who has to do something to kill time for the next three and a half years while waiting for his big chance to be profiled in cover stories for the AARP magazine, balks at the notion that taking HGH is comparable to taking steroids, says that "Testosterone to me is so important for a sense of well-being when you get older," and offers this unsolicited testimonial: "Everyone over 40 years old would be wise to investigate it because it increases the quality of your life. Mark my words. In 10 years it will be over the counter." (It goes without saying that Stallone is something of an authority on the future, having starred in both Demolition Man and Death Race 2000.)

Stallone's dependence on HGH isn't exactly news: a year ago, while he was touring to promote his previous exercise in career necrophilia, Rocky Balboa, he was arrested after Australian customs officials found forty-eight vials of Jintropin in his luggage. (It has been reported that when Stallone was asked why he was traveling with HGH in his suitcase, he answered, with a sideways nod to his shooting schedule, "Where do you think I am going to get this stuff in Burma?") Incidentally, Rambo, which opened last Friday and was widely expected to dominate the box office in its first week, ended up coming in second — behind Meet the Spartans. One can only hope that Stallone doesn't decide take that as a sign that he didn't juice up enough for his latest comeback. If he ups his dosage enough, he might inflate and wind up floating off into the ozone like Yaphet Kotto at the end of Live and Let Die. Actually, now that you mention it...

Writers Of The World, Unite!

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:45:00 GMT

The WGA strike is entering its seventh dreary week, and as anyone who's been forced to sit through an episode of Make Me a Supermodel would agree, we've all suffered enough. Still, with no end in sight, even upstanding joes like Jon Stewart are scabbing it up, and the, erm, highly prestigious Golden Globe Awards are the first major casualty, with the Oscars possibly next to fall.

But the thing about the Writer's Guild of America is that they're the Writer's Guild...of America. Their beef is is with stateside producers and studios, which means that when the BAFTA Awards are held in London on February 10th, writers, actors, and directors will all be able to hobnob together just as if they aren't going to start screaming at each other once they get back across the pond. While not everyone in the UK is happy about it (the Sky One network had the bad luck to buy the rights to broadcast the Golden Globes starting this year), most industry insiders are predicting a bigger-than-usual Hollywood contingent at the BAFTAs.

On the off chance that the Oscars are cancelled this year, what will the network show in its place, though? The Guardian's Toby Young has some ideas, including the appealing notion of a Death Race 2000 ceremony: "A bald announcement of the winners followed by a 'celebrity manhunt' in which eight film crews (each headed by a former Oscar winner) are given four hours to flush as many victors as they can from the homes, parties and spas of Los Angeles. The hunt is screened live in a split-screen format, while the winner who is unlucky enough to be found first has their Oscar ripped from their hands and auctioned off for charity."

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:00:00 GMT

Sandy McCallum as Mr. President/David Carradine as President Frankenstein, DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)

In many ways, Sandy McCallum's "Mr. President" in the sci-fi satire Death Race 2000 was a political leader far ahead of his time. He was a charismatic evangelical in tune with the religious right (he began all his presidential addresses with the line "My children, whom I love"); he remained sequestered in his vacation home even in times of crisis (what is Mr. President's fabled Winter Palace in Beijing but a slightly more grandiose version of the big ranch in Crawford?), and most importantly, he struck home with the American people by isolating and identifying the sole cause of all our national woes, foreign and domestic: the hated French! Still, every great leader's time must eventually pass, and when Mr. President finally lost his life in a freak automotive accident, his successor (likewise ahead of the curve: a popular athlete who parlayed his celebrity status into a career in politics), the wonderfully named President Frankenstein, took over. At first, America was worried — the new president, with his outspoken First Lady and his program of progressive reform, seemed like he might be some sort of bleeding-heart liberal — but our minds were eased when his first official act in office was to run over pesky news media personality Junior Bruce with his car. America loves you, President Frankenstein!

Jeff Bridges as President Jackson Evans, THE CONTENDER (2000)

President Evans is a supporting character in this dull message movie about the trouble his female vice-presidential nominee (Joan Allen) has in getting approved, but he's also the movie's wild card, a slick charmer who isn't actively opposed to doing the right thing whenever possible but mostly seems interested in winning with a minimum of confrontational hassle. His hobby is torturing the staff of the White House kitchen by testing their ability to serve him anything he asks for at any hour of the day; at one point he's spotted wandering the halls and ignoring the person talking to him while munching his latest snack and muttering, "Shark steak. Fuckin' shark steak sandwich. . ."

Henry Fonda as The President, FAIL-SAFE (1964)

This grim melodrama, in which American bombers nuke Moscow because of a technical error, opened some ten months after Dr. Strangelove, an unusual case of the straight version of a story coming after the parody. Actually, this version is fairly funny if you watch it now in the wrong spirit. The nameless president winds up averting World War III by ordering a nuclear strike on New York City to make it up to the Russians, even though the First Lady happens to be in the Big Apple. The movie also came out the same year as The Best Man, in which Fonda played a presidential candidate too pure in heart to develop the killer instinct needed for the job. Fifteen years later he would play the U.S. president again, this time in the disaster movie Meteor. (And let's not forget that one of his early roles was as Young Abe Lincoln in the John Ford classic.) Maybe the real question posed by Fail-Safe is, if Hollywood is such a bastion of liberal bias, then how come every time Fonda, the movie star known as the embodiment of liberal humanism, got cast as the leader of the free world, half the planet wound up in danger of obliteration?

Franchot Tone as The President, ADVISE AND CONSENT (1962)

When Otto Preminger's Washington melodrama opened, New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther glowered at it through his lorgnette and wrote that the filmmakers' "intense and deliberate projection of a cynical attitude toward the actions of politicians extends right up to the President of the United States, whom they frankly portray in this fiction as a man of peculiar principles. He is made (in a tasteless portrayal of a sick, testy man by Franchot Tone) to be tolerant of cheap conniving and the telling of lies under oath." Translated into English, this means that Tone's character is one of the few movie presidents one can imagine actually running the country, a tough, hard-bitten old son of a bitch who knows how to play the game. Unfortunately, we all have our bad days, and he comes to grief after he makes the mistake of trying to appoint — it's him again! — Henry Fonda as Secretary of State. Tone's president, worn out from political machinations and Fonda's high-minded dithering, ultimately succumbs to a heart attack, leaving the country in the hands of his vice-president, Lew Ayres, who makes Hank Fonda look like Solomon crossed with Sean Connery.

Bill Pullman as President Thomas J. Whitmore, INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996) and Gene Hackman as President Alan Richmond, ABSOLUTE POWER (1997)

Taken together, these two films, originally released a little more than six months apart, go a long way towards summing up the Clinton presidency as it was filtered through different fantasy lenses in the popular culture of its time. Pullman's president is, like President Bartlett on The West Wing, a fantasy of an improved Bill Clinton, the Clinton that some disappointed observers wanted him to be: a sensitive liberal-minded family man, but with a record of military heroism (in the first Gulf War) and the ability to keep his dick in his pants. When the movie opens, he's struggling to keep his job as the media and his political enemies paint him as spineless and ineffectual, but the extraterrestrial invasion gives him the chance to show what he's made of: he dusts off his flight suit and kicks a little alien butt, albeit only after the destruction of the White House and the death of his First Lady. (She's played by Mary McDonnell, who wound up getting her own TV presidency after robots took their turn trying to wipe out the human race on Battlestar Galactica.) President Richmond represents Clinton the defiler, the rampaging amoral deviant unfit for polite society, let alone high office; the film's director-star, Clint Eastwood, has to take matters into his own hands and bring about justice after he's seen Richmond's Secret Service bodyguards kill a woman who was trying to defend herself from a violent sexual assault at POTUS's hands. The cover-up is handled by the president's evil, female chief of staff (Judy Davis), a Hillary even he couldn't bring himself to marry. Oddly enough, Absolute Power also laid the seeds for a future TV presidency: one of Richmond's murderous goons is played by Dennis Haysbert, who later became the martyred President David Palmer on 24.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Check back tomorrow for Part 3!