It's about to be Memorial Day weekend in America, and everyone's getting revved up for the race.
The last Sunday of every May, thousands of motor enthusiasts and people looking for an excuse to drink descend on the second most populous city in the Midwest to watch cars go around in a circle all day long. I am of course talking about The Indy 500. They put it in the same month as the Kentucky Derby as if to say, "Suck it, Louisville. Cars are way faster than horses."
And while that may be, the event is so montonously non-lethal. Almost nobody dies in these cars that go 225 miles per hour. The engineers are way too good at their job.
How am I supposed to be interested when the stakes are that low? I want to watch a race where people die.
This week's Thursday Thriller is Roger Corman's Death Race 2050.
This 2017 action/comedy by G.J. Echternkamp takes place in the not-so-far-flung future of 2050, when America is truly run like a business, a massive conglomerate known as the United Corporations of America. There's no president any more, just The Chairman, played by Malcolm McDowell. What's the Chairman's solution to problems of overpopulation? Distraction by spectacle. Each year a handful of drivers and their proxies race across the country and run over people for points. They can be a little hard to come by because most people are inside watching the chaos on their virtual reality sunglasses.
Manu Bennett plays Frankenstein, a champion driver who's been put back together after crashes multiple times. America adores him, but he is disillusioned. Marci Miller plays Annie Sullivan, his proxy. Sullivan has a helmet camera so she can broadcast the race from inside the car. The two don't get along very well.
Ignore the synopsis Netflix gives you, this not a sequel to the Corman-produced 1975 classic Death Race 2000, which was directed by Paul Bartel and stars David Carradine as Frankenstein, nor is it the next chapter in the Corman-produced franchise that Paul W.S. Anderson rebooted in 2008 with Jason Statham. Roger Corman's Death Race 2050 is a re-make of the 1975 version. Presumably Echternkamp reminded Corman it was supposed to be funny.
The plot is nearly identical, but the details vary. Instead of Sylvester Stallone as Machine Gun Joe Vaterbo as Frankenstein's arch-nemesis, you get Burt Grinstead as Jed Perfectus, a man who was genetically engineered to be a perfect physical specimen so as to usher in a new era of human evolution. Instead of Roberta Collins as Matilda The Hun, you get Anessa Ramsey as Tammy the Terrorist, a religious extremist whose precise denomination is unclear, but appears to worship Elvis Presley. Helen Loris plays an altogether new character Dr. Creamer, who rides along in a car she designed to drive itself and serve as a sex toy that brings her to climax every time it kills somebody.
As with any good satire, there's a little something to piss off everybody in this violent jaunt. If you're not put off by the over-the-top stereotypes in the character of driver/hip-hop artist Minerva Jefferson (Folake Olowofoyeku), then her hit song, "Drive! Drive! Kill! Kill!" will probably get under your skin when she gets to the part about killing white people.
I'm not usually into remakes, but a lot has happened with technology and celebrity culture since 1975. A lot of other movies have borrowed ideas from Death Race 2000, so it's only right a remake come steal them back. (Yeah, I'm looking at your TV announcers, Hunger Games.) The premise needed some updated jokes and it got 'em.
Roger Corman's Death Race 2050 streams on Netflix.
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