Run Down Grandma! It's On Us!

Let's take a trip down memory lane. You're driving with a friend. An elderly woman walks out into traffic. You're traffic. She's about 100 yards off. Your friend turns and says, "100 points for the hag."

Raise your hand if that has NOT happened to you. Everybody else is living in the cultural aftermath of Deathrace 2000, a dark, silly little black comedy where the object of the race is to take out as many pedestrians as possible.

I'm not joking.

Back in 1975, three decades before Kill Bill, David Carradine was trying to change his image. After three years of playing Kwai Chang Cane on TV's "Kung Fu," Carradine needed a break - not just from the show but from the image of an angelic Buddhist who speaks in two-word spurts that make a fortune cookie sound chatty.

This was that break.

Death Race 2000 is basically The Running Man, but with exhaust. With the country coming undone from Vietnam, Watergate and bad middle-of-the-road pop, it imagined what life would be like in the year 2000. Unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had mankind on its way to Jupiter, Deathrace 2000 envisions a future where - believe it or not - the hicks are in charge, television has become a hideous bastion of reality shows and running down pedestrians has become a national sport, used to pay off the national debt.

Okay, two out of three ain't bad.

Frankenstein (David Carradine) is a cross-ccountry road-killing NASCAR driver who discovers - cue the cellos - that a government agency is trying to shut down the race. To achieve their ends, they've sent in an undercover agent to pose as navigator on one of the cars. As things get crazy, drivers start dying and Frankenstein wakes up to find himself Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible.

This is an odd little film, pure drive-in fodder, but look for a young Sylvester Stallone, who plays Machine Gun Joe. A year later, he'd become a superstar, by way of Rocky. But in '75, he was just a big lug with an Italian face. If you're looking for writing, directing or acting, you might want to keep looking. Deathrace 2000 is that dvd at the very bottom of a Walmart worthless-dvds clearance bin, but for the real treasure seeker, there's nothing quite like watching a movie that belongs in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 sketch.

I'd invite my friends over, and keep the popcorn coming.