ICE-Vision: Death Race 2000 (Paul Bartel, 1975)
Thursday, February 23 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150
Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.
“Vintage 1975 sleazebucket production from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, loaded with sex, violence, and general vulgarity, but orchestrated by one of the most interesting personalities then operating in the exploitation field, Paul Bartel. The story, about a road race in the not-too-distant future for which the drivers are given points for running down pedestrians, becomes an elaborate and telling fantasy about our peculiar popular entertainments. Fine work carved from minimal materials. With David Carradine and a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone. R, 78 min.” -Chicago Reader
“…may well represent the most immediate effect of late-60’s radicalism on American filmmaking. Mr. Corman’s habit of hiring promising young talents fresh out of film school introduced a deep strain of anarchic rebellion into otherwise routine exploitation formulas. As a character in ”Death Race 2000” announces, ”The era of obedience has passed,” and the film gives free rein to anti-authoritarian sentiments.”