Death Race!

On Friday, I posted about Sylvester Stallone's "Over the Top," playing yesterday afternoon at the Katy Alamo Drafthouse (too lazy to re-link).

Anyway, while searching for some art/sculpture stuff, I came across this early warning. Saturday, July 29th, at the Orange Show parking lot drive-in -

Death Race 2000!



Why synchronicity? Because I believe I won a different AIM Friday Movie Contest back in the day (category: "Best Guy Movie") with this movie, and it's got Stallone in it!

Finally, FIRST PLACE (and the official presidency of The Friday Movie Contest's He-Man Club) goes to Jay H... for his learned analysis on both the surface and the cleverly-concealed subtext of the much-maligned Sylvester Stallone vehicle "Death Race 2000." This is classic: "Death Race 2000 - Manliness? Yes: Manly man Sylvester Stallone before he became a manliness joke with the body-oil-and-big-guns fiasco of Rambo: First Blood II. Violence? O yeah: This is a movie about driving racecars that are actually deadly weapons; the titular race is actually more of killing spree with scoring based on victim demographics. Romance? Well...: David Carradine plays the anti-hero of the racing crowd, whose body's been mangled by explosive crashes but rebuilt into the perfect driver. Twist is, that he's really suave and sensitive David Carradine just doin' it for the fans; this obviously wins over his principled-yet-bimboish racing mechanic. Awww... Why this one handily beats Braveheart should be apparent to anyone: murderous racecars. When I first saw Braveheart, I thought, "Surely Babe will beat this for Best Picture." But then I also thought, "Where are all the murderous racecars?!" The racers are uniformly great, like if something cool were to result from Cannonball Run mixing it up with Professional Wrestling. There's also a simple-yet-clever political subtext about the totalitarian propaganda inherent in sports entertainment; but this is about The World's Greatest Guy Movie. So, I'll sum up... Rocky Balboa and Caine from Kung Fu drive murderous race cars in a race to kill pedestrians, while an underground revolution is rising to depose the American President whose power is based on the race itself. 70's bimbo's learn that freakish serial killers named Frankenstein can be nice guys, and we all got a glimpse of what life would be like in the year 2000."

Serendipity? Could be.