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Not the silent-movie past of Edwards' The Great Race but a comic-book future, less Chuck Jones cartoon (though there is an acute evocation of Wile E. Coyote) than Lichtenstein mock-dystopia. "The American tradition of no-holds-barred" is what's left at the fin de millénaire, "The Star-Spangled Banner" and swastikas fill the new Circus Maximus, things haven't been the same since "the World Crash of '79." Spikes, horns and blades adorn the vehicles at the annual Transcontinental Death Race, the winner at the finish line is the one with the highest pedestrian body-count. (Toddlers and geezers provide the most points on the splatter score.) From his Peking summer palace the President gives the gladiators the green light: Machine Gun Joe (Sylvester Stallone), Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins) and Nero the Hero (Martin Kove) in a grindhouse travesty of Cornelius' Genevieve. Frankenstein the star driver has been pieced back together after a series of spills, he sips from an oil can through his leather mask until he's uncloaked as David Carradine, "half a face and half a chest and all the guts in the world." Open roads and red splashes in Paul Bartel's pop-punk satire, a subversive grenade concealed in the handshake of drive-in shlock. Massacres and detours and ambushes broadcast for eager audiences, meanwhile France get blamed for the saboteurs from the Resistance, the revolution is certainly televised. The absurdity of fandom and the inanity of network commentary (Don Steele hollers for the benefit of Fellini's Ginger e Fred), Carradine's sandpaper drawl and Stallone's slobbering snarl are the voices of tomorrow. "Once more, I give you what you want." The only possible follow-up to the bludgeon is NASCAR itself, unless it's Carpenter's Escape from L.A. With Simone Griffeth, Louisa Moritz, Sandy McCallum, Joyce Jameson, Carle Bensen, and Harriet Medin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |