Deathsport (1978)

According to IMDB trivia “David Carradine smoked a lot of marijuana while shooting this film”. Gee, you don’t say...cause I’d never have guessed that going off how clean-cut and sober he looks in this film.

The various remakes, prequels, rip-offs and ‘thematic’ sequels to Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000 do seem to split into two different groups. Some like Death Race 2050 try to recapture the black comedy and satire of Bartel’s film but fall of their asses when it comes to being an action movie, others like the Statham/Luke Goss movies press down hard on the action movie pedal but leave the humour in the dust. 1978’s Deathsport, Roger Corman/New World’s sort of follow-up to Death Race 2000, is very much of the latter camp, its action packed yet all rather po-faced and lacking much of a personality. The barely coherent plot of Deathsport, set "a thousand years from tomorrow" involves nomadic psychics played by David Carradine and Claudia Jennings being rounded up and imprisoned by cruel dictator Lord Zirpola. Since the death penalty has been abolished a thousand years from tomorrow, Carradine and Jennings are forced to compete in the ‘Deathsport’ basically gladiatorial games that Zirpola uses to satisfy the bloodshed of the violence loving masses. Meanwhile, Zirpola gets his own jollies by electrocuting butt naked women in his own personal torture chamber. Once Carradine and Jennings escape Lord Zirpola’s clutches the film becomes a chase across the desert on futuristic motorbikes, as they are hunted by Zirpola’s leather clad henchman Ankar Moor (Richard Lynch) and somehow also find the time to rescue a little girl from a tribe of ping-pong ball eyed mutants.

Calling this a ‘troubled production’ is putting it mildly, stories about on-set drug use, physical altercations between cast and crew and people getting fired have surrounded this film for years. The saga resurfaced in the early 1990s when a David Carradine interview led to a heated war of words between Carradine and original director Nicholas Niciphor in the letters page of Psychotronic Video magazine over what exactly went down on set.

Evidence of this collectively bad experience is all up there onscreen, Deathsport is a particularly messy film, a character built up as a major villain is abruptly and unceremoniously killed off mid-way through the film, the titular ‘Deathsport’ meant to be a main plot point only gets about 10 minutes of screen time, and Carradine appears especially agitated and bad tempered throughout. Then again, given that he spends much of the film wandering about the desert in a diaper, wielding a plywood sword and playing a character who appears to be a combo of Jesus, Luke Skywalker and Evel Knievel, who can really blame him. Carradine really does look like a man who has been through the desert on a horse with no name in this film.



I first encountered Deathsport on the Granada Men and Motors channel (of all places), a low-rent TV channel whose blokeish output mostly consisted of T&A and sports programming, but who went through a brief period of showing ultra-obscure action and kung-fu movies at ungodly hours of the night. Since Death Race 2000 was still fresh in my mind at the time, I was pretty underwhelmed by Deathsport initially, but I have found that it grows on you over each successive viewing. Especially if you return to it fully in the knowledge that you’re not going to get another Death Race 2000 here, and I’m happy to admit I had lots of fun with it this time around. The combined charisma of Carradine, Claudia Jennings and Richard Lynch somehow keep this shambolic ship afloat, the cut-price ‘futuristic’ costumes and vehicles lend laughability and Deathsport does boast an entertainingly reckless obsession with pyrotechnics and motorbike stunts.

There is a particularly jaw dropping moment when an actor who was meant to be set on fire accidently brushes past and sets alight to another actor who clearly wasn’t meant to be set on fire, and boy does that poor bastard look frantic and alarmed as he tries to put himself out. All of which they of course left in the film!! If we learn nothing else from Deathsport it is that stoned actors should never be let anywhere near lit torches.

The fact that the film was salvaged by one of Corman’s in-house directors means that Deathsport is pretty much your textbook 1970s Roger Corman production, X amount of female nudity, X amount of violence, XXX amount of things blowing up, and some left-leaning/eco politics (about how we should renounce violence, grow beards and go back to riding about on horseback)... y’know for all the students and the chin strokers out there.