Review of Deathsport (1978) by Michael W — 27 Sep 2011

Deathsport (Allan Arkush, 1978).

When I was just a wee film critic, back in my early teens, I had three favorite movies. I'd seen each well over a dozen times, and had pretty much memorized every line in all of them. I have revisited two of them on a regular basis, Phantasm and The Exorcist, and they have held up well. The other was Deathsport, Allan Arkush and Roger Corman's swords-sandals-and-laser-motorcycles far-future epic that faded into obscurity by the mid-eighties. I hadn't had a chance to see it since until a few nights ago. And now I wonder what on earth I was thinking.

John Carradine stars as Kaz Oshay, a range guide in the year 3000. The world was long ago devastated by nuclear war, and most of humanity lives in large walled cities. Range guides live outside those cities, and as their title suggests, are generally paid to escort groups of travelers moving between cities. Ankar Moor (Laid to Rest's Richard Lynch) is the President of one of these cities, and he is slowly going mad, suffering from a debilitating disease. As he becomes more and more paranoid, he both feels the need to bolster the defenses of the city with a newly-discovered ancient technology, the destructo-cycles (you can't make the stuff up... well, unless you're Roger Corman), and simultaneously show the people how powerful they are by turning Deathsport into an exhibition/advertisement. Now, Deathsport is your basic trial by combat gig where you send two condemned prisoners into the ring and only one comes out. Ankar Moor wants to change things up. First, he pits the condemned against city guards on destructo-cycles, but he quickly realizes that's not going to fill the people with confidence. So why not pit the destructo-cycles against the toughest humans on the planet? I'll bet you can guess who they are. And thus Kaz Oshay and a few other range guides (we don't get to know any of them other than Deneer, played with very little but a sense of irony and a killer smile by Fast Company's Claudia Jennings, killed in a car wreck a year after this film was released) find themselves in prison for no reason other than Ankar Moor beings nuts. Well, we know how that goes, don't we?

Of course, when I was eleven years old, I had no idea who Roger Corman was (though looking back, I'd certainly seen an awful lot of his films). By now the Corman method of filmmaking is common knowledge, and in fact it's pretty common practice in Hollywood these days: pump it out as fast and cheap as possible and hope the rubes pay. The difference is that the studios are now willing to greenlight a Cormanesque film for a two hundred million-dollar budget (viz. Transformers: Dark of the Moon), while Corman himself had, what, thirty thousand bucks, maybe? And most of that probably went for the tinfoil used to turn motorcycles into destructo-cycles.

If you're into cheesy sci-fi pictures, this one should be at the top of your list. It's horribly acted, the script is worthless, the special effects are laughable, the direction is competent in spots but (like all of Arkush's early work) shows very little of the serviceable director he would become in the eighties. For anyone else, though, this is likely to be a painful experience to attempt to sit through. *.