Death Race 2000

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Year:	1975
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	Paul Bartel
Genre:	Petrol-head exploitation classic
Starring:	David Carradine, Simone Griffeth, Sylvester Stallone, Mary Woronov, Roberta Collins, Martin Kove, Louisa Moritz
Rating:	4/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072856/
Tagline:	In The Year 2000 Hit And Run Driving Is No Longer A Felony. It's The National Sport!
Favourite line:	"As the cars roar into Pennsylvania, the cradle of liberty, it seems apparent that our citizens are staying off the streets, which may make scoring particularly difficult…."

Roger Corman produced exploitation fodder:

The plot:
It’s the future – well, the year 2000 – and the 20th annual Transcontinental Road Race begins.
Six racers, each with unique attributes, driving cars equipped with weaponry and booby traps. The aim of the race: To score as many points as possible by mowing down hapless pedestrians. Points are allotted based on the type of person killed. A regular adult scores low points, whilst a youngster serves up a decent tally, but the ultimate kill is a pensioner, scoring a maximum 100 points.
The points total, combined with time taken to complete the coast to coast race, decides the ultimate winner, always assuming anyone actually makes it to the end, as a gang of rebels, determined to put a stop to the violence, seek to kill off the competitors along the way.

It’s a Roger Corman movie, so we should pretty much know what to expect: a stripped down, simplistic concept, low budget stylings and lots and lots of padding, as the plotline struggles to fill the eighty minute runtime.
For those not quite sure what an exploitation movie is, here’s the skinny:
Take a story that has made national headlines some time in the past twelve months, invert it or corrupt it somehow to squeeze it into either a sci-fi, horror or just plain grisly concept, throw in a bunch of nudity, swearing, a bit of blood and guts, some taboo subject matter – here it’s Nazi imagery – whisk it all up and, heh presto, you’ve got yourself an exploitation movie.
Sylvester Stallone makes an early appearance here, as Machine Gun Joe, and cult hero David Carradine does a decent turn as crowd favourite Frankenstein, both adding a dusting of star power.
The race itself is well presented, with much use made of cameras strapped onto cars ripping through winding roads, though the cars themselves are a bit silly, the low budget only allowing slight modifications to normal cars, so the end result looks more Robot Wars than Carmaggedon.
Same with the splatter, really.
A cult favourite – and it’s easy to see why –this has much kitsch appeal, and fans of horror, sci-fi and low budget cinema would do well to check this out.
Most entertaining.