DEATH RACE 2000 - FILMSTRUCK/CRITERION CHANNEL

Hey, what gives, Paul Bartel? The year 2000 you show in your movie Death Race 2000 is nothing like the turn of the century I lived through.

Or maybe it’s a little like it. Reality television competitions, a worship of celebrity--these things were very much in vogue. And we were just a year away from the tyrannical reign of The Fast and theFurious. So, Bartel’s broad satire about a cross-country race where trumped-up celebs mow down unsuspecting pedestrians maybe wasn’t that far off the mark.

Death Race 2000 stars David Carradine, fresh off of TV’s Kung-Fu, as Frankenstein, the leather-clad, mysterious, dark hero of the government-sanctioned race. Purported to be sporting robotic limbs after losing arms and legs from crashes in years previous--and covering the scars of the same--he is the rebellious antihero inspiring imitators and groupies. His main competition is Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (pronounced like “Turbo”), a throwback East Coast gangster-type, played by a young Sylvester Stallone. They are two of five racers, with the other major players being the lusty cowgirl Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov, also in Bartel’s Eating Raoul [review]) and the Nazi temptress Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins). Each driver has a tricked-out car and a navigator riding alongside them. That the co-pilots are all members of the opposite sex means these companions will do more than navigate.

A B-movie from Roger Corman’s infamous low-budget studio, it was prerequisite that Death Race 2000 would have plenty of sex and violence--though the latter is of the cartoonish, “red paint” variety. Yet, like most enduring exploitation pictures, there is more going on around the race than the simplified premise would suggest. Based on a short story by Ib Melchior (Robinson Crusoe on Mars [review]), the screenplay by Charles Griffith (The Little Shop of Horrors) and Robert Thom (Bloody Mama) frames the race as a televised event, complete with colorful commentary from disc jockey Real Don Steele and gossip-mongering reporters. It also cuts away from the action to show a counterrevolutionary movement looking to shut the race down. Their beef is that the government, run by the generic Mr. President (Sandy McCallum), is using the bloody shenanigans to distract from starvation and oppression. Think The Hunger Games [review] on wheels.

Death Race 2000 is entertaining and schlocky in all the right ways, though it’s lost some of its sexiness over time. I am not sure if it’s the fact that critiques of the vapidity and prurience of some pop culture has become so prevalent that Death Race 2000 no longer feels necessary or special, or that Bartel works with such a broad hand that the satire wasn’t that sharp to begin with, but the critical aspects of Death Race 2000 don’t carry much force all these years on. It seems a little too aligned with the thing it means to lampoon. The fun of watching Death Race 2000 is reveling in the comical deaths and dirty play. And it’s hard to pretend to be above celebrity culture while enjoying a hammy Stallone eating clam sauce with his fingers. We only care because he’s Sylvester Stallone, his reputation precedes him. It’s hard to say how famous this movie would still be with any other personality in the part. (Carradine fares better, delivering his usual ice-cold intensity.)

Luckily, the film is mercifully short, and perhaps Bartel’s smartest move is not striving for a greater point that his shoestring budget might not have allowed for. I haven’t seen any of the remakes or sequels, but something tells me they probably get it a lot more wrong than the original; Death Race 2000 is at least a quaint relic with a few visceral pleasures.

EATING RAOUL (Blu-Ray) - #625

I remember the print ads for Eating Raoul from when I was a kid. Even in black-and-white in the newspaper, the big lips seemed somehow dirty to me. I really don't know where or how it would have landed on my radar as such, maybe the ad copy made that clear, I just knew this film was somehow subversive. It never came up in my family's discussions about what movie we were going to go see, and we went to just about everything. Just not Eating Raoul. This avoidance carried over into the cable years, when it seemed to be scheduled fairly regularly on Cinemax. 

So here it is some 30 years later and Paul Bartel's cult comedy has come to the Criterion Collection and I am seeing Eating Raoul at last. My curiosity was definitely high. When Paul Bartel, who also co-writes and stars in the picture, died in 2000, the praise for his work was effusive. Sometimes it just takes the rest of us some time to catch up.

Though, now that I've seen Eating Raoul, I'm not entirely sure what it was that garnered that praise. What was subversive in the Reagan era, I have to admit, now just seems quaint. For a black comedy about sex and murder, Eating Raoul is shockingly tame.

Bartel plays Paul Bland, a snobbish wine connoisseur with sexual repression issues. His wife Mary (Mary Woronov, a former member of Warhol's Factory) is a nurse who attracts all kinds of unwanted attention. She gets groped by horny patients and skeevy bankers alike (the latter is a nice cameo part for Buck Henry). The Blands want to open up their own restaurant out of the city and get away from the perverts of the sexual revolution that they find so loathsome. As fate would have it, the swingers they hate so much turn out to be their solution to their money woes. When one breaks into their apartment and attacks Mary, Paul kills him with a frying pan. The dead man is carrying a lot of cash in his wallet. If they can attract more of his kind, maybe the Blands could get enough for their down payment.

The pair place an ad in the local rag advertising themselves as s&m masters, all part of a plan to lure the would-be clients to their apartment, bonk them on the head with the pan, and take their money. When another crook, a thief named Raoul (Robert Beltran, Star Trek: Voyager), stumbles onto their scheme, he offers the Blands a deal: they provide the patsies, and he will dispose of their bodies and their possessions (clothes, cars, etc.), and they'll split the extra cash he makes. This works out pretty good at first, until Raoul's charms, aided by some premium marijuana, lure Mary over to the dark side the married couple so disdain.

Eating Raoul is an intentionally scandalous send-up of social mores, with its sites aimed clearly on the opposite sides of the sexual divide. Bartel and co-writer Richard Blackburn (Lemora) parody both the squares and the swingers with equal venom. The Blands are uptight snobs who are living in denial, while the party animals they slay are twisted and deluded. The net the writers throw over their comedic prey encompasses not just sexual hang-ups, but also how race and class informs the Blands' drive to get what they think is coming to them. In terms of satire, Eating Raoul has the most in common with the John Waters school of comedy. Bartel and Blackburn sprinkle their script with slang for outrageous sex acts, and they invent increasingly elaborate role-play scenarios for Paul and Mary's victims. One is a Nazi, another likes Minnie Mouse, etc.

What Bartel's film lacks, however, is Waters' gleeful reveling in all things nasty and outrageous. Eating Raoul is missing the quintessential tackiness and the anything-goes abandon that have allowed movies like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble to maintain their edginess. Hell, even minor John Waters flicks like A Dirty Shame does the icky sex stuff better. Seeing that sex-crazed comedy had me running Urban Dictionary in overtime just trying to sort out everything referenced in the script. (Can anyone say, "upper decker"?) Maybe Eating Raoul really blew their hair back when the dweebs and the norms watched it back in 1982, but it just seems silly now. The music is outdated, the costumes and sets look cheap, and the big punchline that Bartel is building to...well, I hate to tell you, but the spoilers couldn't be more out in front of this one unless Bartel turned his title into a complete sentence.

I guess it was still kind of neat to see what all the fuss was about after all this time, but if you don't have the same nostalgic connection to Eating Raoul as I do, you might wonder if it's called a "cult movie" because once upon a time audiences were brainwashed into thinking that Eating Raoul was so outlandish. 

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVD Talk. Images here were provided by the Criterion Collection and were not taken from the Blu-Ray under review.