Peter Fonda was offered the role at first, but turned it down for being too ridiculous.īoth Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine drove their own cars, though often the cars did not run at all and had to be pushed down hills.
#DEATH RACE 2000 CARMAGEDDON MOVIE#
This movie was David Carradine’s film debut, who took the role of Frankenstein to distance himself from Caine, the character that made him famous in the TV series Kung Fu. Stallone also wrote some of his own dialog. But in this he is Machine Gun Joe, a mob thug with a thing for losing his temper and attacking things. Death Race 2000 enjoyed a resurgence in popularity when Sylvester Stallone became a big star years later as Rocky and Rambo. There was also a spiritual remake in the Jason Statham-headlining Death Race, which transposed the action from a Dystopian America to a corrupt future prison. The movie was a clear inspiration and several of Carmageddon‘s cars are tributes to the racers in the film. If you think elements of Death Race 2000 look familiar, it may be because you once played one of the Carmageddon games. Really, is there any higher praise than that? It was produced by Mr Cult Movie himself, Roger Corman.ĭeath Race 2000 was a violent, almost-pointless action movie that offended just about any reasonable adult that saw it. It’s one of the few movies with ‘2000’ in the title that doesn’t suck. It’s got stupid cars, stupid people and a lot of violence (for its day). It’s perfect Seventies nonsense that is every kind of retro-cool forty years later. Death Race 2000 doesn’t need any motivation to watch. If you think I just wrote an entire essay about The Hunger Games, you got me. Despite their similarities, I don’t see these two hooking up. The main bad guy has a giant hunting knife strapped to his hood. It’s just interesting how the two films seem to think alike, except that Hunger Games is more slick action with introspective moments, while Death Race is about crushing heads under tyres. The Hunger Games is way classier than Death Race 2000. That’s the plot for Death Race 2000.īut don’t get me wrong. If you think I’m still talking about The Hunger Games, I’m not. You’d love to strangle those expressions off their face.Īdding no sympathy to their cause is that they prop up a seemingly benign dictatorship masked as liberty and they encourage participation in a televised sport where winner takes all and the losers die. You really hate their insincere grinning mugs and condescending comfort with what they are doing. Maybe the presenters from this classic’s TV sequences just happen to share that same glib awfulness that the aristocrats in Hunger Games also seem to possess. That said, whoever made the Hunger Games films undeniably had a copy of Death Race 2000 on their shelf. So a lot of The Hunger Games has been done and redone before and nobody owns the idea. One notable is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 classic The Running Man. This theme appears a lot of times and even televised bloodsports have been around for a while. It’s not a new idea anyway – the concept of the last-one-standing post-apocalyptic game show is a long running one, a subset in the ‘bloodsport’ trope. The two films are nothing alike and if Suzanne Collins did copy her idea from Battle Royale, she changed everything else. Yes, they have similar themes, but the shared genealogy pretty much ends there. I’m going to go out on a limb here and argue that when The Hunger Games hit our screens, it wasn’t really a rip-off of Battle Royale.