Word: races
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...nouveau Alcatraz called Terminal Island, Warden Hennessey (Joan Allen, merging her purse-lipped Pat Nixon impersonation with the imperious tenseness of Dick Nixon in late-Watergate mode) is in charge of an annual televised car-nage held on a giant track within the prison. In this Death Race, lifers drive the souped-up, heavily armed autos, and are promised an early release if they win five races. One of the inmates, a masked mystery man known as Frankenstein, is a four-time champion, hence the pay-per-view audience's favorite roadster. Hennessey's secret problem: Frank died from injuries...
...Real Death Race Death Race seems just fine, in its churning turbo-tone, until you watch the film that inspired it. Death Race 2000 was a snarky exploitation film put out by Roger Corman's New World Pictures. The director was Paul Bartel, best known for his elegant horror comedies Private Parts and Eating Raoul. The script, from a story by Ib Melchior, was by two Corman stalwarts, Robert Thom (Wild in the Street, Bloody Mama) and Charles B. Griffith, the seminal creator of early Corman monsterpieces, from It Conquered the World to The Little Shop of Horrors...
...premise of both films is similar: In a fascist America of the near future, outlaws race funny cars to save or end their lives. But in the original the script is crazy-dark, the directorial mood way more larkish, free-wheeling, anarchic...
...autumn 2002, when official opposition to the impending Iraq invasion was mostly cowed into silence. Except that in the movie there is an insurgency, led by one Thomasina Paine, and it means to terminate the daredevil drivers, who are seen as the President's gladiators, their race a circus to anaesthetize the public...
...Whereas the Anderson film is mostly confined, like the cons, to Terminal Island, Death Race 2000 travels from New York City (where the pedestrian traffic signs flash "WALK," then "RUN") to "New Los Angeles." And in contrast to the all-male gang in the new film, with the ladies reduced to riding shotgun, Bartel's drivers are equally split between men and women. David Carradine is Frankenstein, and a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone plays Machine Gun Joe, but there's also Warhol renegade Mary Woronov as Calamity Jane and Roberta Collins as Goth gal Mathilda the Hun. They...