DEATHSPORT: Life After The Schlock-A-Lypse, With Motorbikes & Explosions

It has been said fre­quently on this blog but it bears repeat­ing: Roger Corman’s New World Pictures was the best of all the indie out­fits crank­ing out b-movies dur­ing the 1970’s.  Corman’s smarts ensured that his prod­uct had energy and enter­tain­ment value even when it aes­thet­i­cally fell short of the mark.

Deathsport is a good exam­ple of a New World pro­gram­mer that man­ages to enter­tain despite some seri­ous fail­ings.  The plot­ting is boil­er­plate future-schlock set in a world where peo­ple either live as “states­men” in pro­tected kingdom-like cities or an out­land area filled with mutants and free-roaming Conan types known as “range guides.”  Kaz Oshay (David Carradine) and Deneer (Claudia Jennings) are two such guides, who both get kid­napped by the silver-jumpsuited min­ions of Lord Zirpola (David McLean), a city ruler who has gone insane due to brain cancer.

Zirpola forces Kaz and Deneer into par­tic­i­pat­ing in the title activ­ity, a gladiators-with-zapguns-on-motorbikes sport that enter­tains the cit­i­zens while also keep­ing them in line (trou­ble­some cit­i­zens often end up in the game).  Of course, Kaz and Deneer have no inten­tion of liv­ing out their lives in the Deathsport so they make a dar­ing escape dur­ing a game with fel­low team mem­bers Doctor Karl (William Smithers) and Markus (Will Walker).  They are chased deep into the out­lands by Ankar Moor (Richard Lynch), a trai­tor­ous guide-turned-statesman deter­mined to kill Kaz, and an end­less array of silver-jumpsuit dudes on cycles.

This assem­blage of ele­ments might sound like the basis for a tidy sci-fi schlocker but Deathsport unrav­els before the viewer’s eyes like an unholy, god­less mess.  The plot is full of dead ends, the dia­logue is lethally bad pseudo-poetry, the title sport makes no sense, every futur­is­tic ele­ment looks poverty-row cheap (even by Corman stan­dards) and it’s shame­lessly padded despite an 81-minute run­ning time.  To top it all off, the film also boasts one of the worst, least lis­ten­able elec­tronic scores ever recorded.

Many of these prob­lems are due to the film’s trou­bled pro­duc­tion his­tory: ini­tial direc­tor “Henry Suso” (alias Nick Niciphor) was a film-school grad who didn’t under­stand Corman-style film­mak­ing and turned in a bad art movie that lacked action or nudity.  Corman hired Allan Arkush to do 8 days of reshoots designed to pump it up with chases, explo­sions and plenty of nudity from Jennings.  The end result is absolutely schizoid: one minute it plays like Ed Wood direct­ing an Ingmar Bergman film, the next minute it’s blow­ing up dum­mies on cheap junker-motorcycles.

Despite this tor­tured back­story (and the end result’s inco­her­ence), Deathsport is actu­ally fun to watch if you’re the right, low-brow frame of mind.  It moves very fast (kudos to edi­tor Larry Bock) and vet­eran b-movie cin­e­matog­ra­pher Gary Graver gets a sur­pris­ing amount of atmos­phere from the California desert loca­tions.  Carradine and Jennings over­come their noth­ing char­ac­ter­i­za­tions via pure b-movie charisma and Richard Lynch applies max­i­mum grav­i­tas to his vil­lain role, giv­ing the film’s best performance.

There are some dull stretches in the sec­ond half but Deathsport always man­ages to pick itself up by throw­ing out some­thing trashy and/or unin­ten­tion­ally funny at you every five min­utes: high­lights include a tor­ture device where naked women are shocked with col­ored lights and bad synth music, the least scary mutants in film his­tory, the “lan­guage” of the guides (which sounds like a mix of fortune-cookie apho­risms and encounter-group jar­gon) and the uproar­i­ously artsy finale, in which Lynch and Carradine spew bad lines before fight­ing samu­rai style with silly-looking plas­tic swords.  Also, there’s a fire stunt where the intended human torch acci­den­tally sets an off-camera crew mem­ber on fire.

In short, Deathsport is a godaw­ful mess but it’s love­ably godaw­ful mess.  Like the best bad movies, it packs many dif­fer­ent kinds of trashy con­tent into its short run­ning time and does so with a per­versely mis­guided yet fas­ci­nat­ing style.  You’ve got to hand it to Roger Corman: even his bottom-of-the-barrel junk was bet­ter than every­one else’s bottom-of-the-barrel junk.

Death Sport/Battle Truck [Double Feature] Death Sport: In the year 3000, there’ll be no more Olympic Games, World Series, or Superbowl. There’ll be only Death Sport. Battle Truck: Post-World War III tale of col­lapsed gov­ern­ments and bank­rupt coun­tries herald­ing a new law­less age. Also known as Warlords of the 21st Century.