Someone asked Anderson the question: Why are there no points for mowing down pedestrians in your car, like in the original? I'm paraphrasing here, because I was still in shock from hearing what Corman had said. But Death Race director Anderson completely side-stepped the question, by saying in this movie they will be explaining how the race became a prison thing. If there's a sequel, they'll explain about the points.

Seriously, you know you didn't include the best part of the original because you were a baby. A little baby wuss. Your movie takes place in a corrupt future, where prisoners drive in a televised race to win their freedom, and you're telling me no extra points for a fatality?

Another audience member even gave Corman an out for his previous statement, asking since there were so many remade movies if Corman could think of any movie that shouldn't be reworked. Corman said originally he thought Death Race 2000 shouldn't be remade, but Anderson did such a great job he convinced Thom otherwise.

Then we saw a clip where Jason Statham beats the hell out of this guy who apparently murdered Statham's family. Oh, and when the cars drive over little sword circles the car gains weapons, and if they drive over shield circles the cars gain armor. So at least it'll be easy to adapt into a video game. Either way, the disrespect paid to the original movie, even with the original writers receiving a writing credit, is downright awful.

Update: We originally misidentified Corman as the late writer of Death Race 2000, Robert Thom. We regret any confusion we may have caused.

[Deathrace Official Site via IESB]

People will probably compare Death Race to Grand Theft Auto: It takes place in a dystopian future where people participate in cross-country "death races" where drivers try to hit pedestrians for points. Starring an awesome David Carradine and a stoned-looking Sylvester Stallone, it combined everything great in the universe. The remake, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson of the many Resident Evil movies, takes place in a jail setting — prisoners race to get their sentences reduced rather than just for the sheer, fucked-up fun of it. That makes the drivers more sympathetic, but the movie less outrageous. Still, the cars look Doomsday-great.

Want to see more of the cars in Death Race? Check out Jalopnik's exhaustive post.

The dark secret of Quintet is that it's sort of a crappy game. Here Newman is, having lost his entire family to the postapocalyptic Rottweilers and stab-happy Quintet players, and he's finally killed his last opponent in the game. And it only now occurs to him to find out what the prize is. Which is, basically, bragging rights. You get to hang around the crappy parlor with the guy in the zany felt hat and talk about all the people you scragged. I would at least want a sticker, or maybe a slice of blueberry pie. With whipped cream.

In Car Wars, scarce resources lead the U.S. government to nationalize oil production, causing a second American Civil War. Three "Free Oil States" spring up with their own oil production — Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. Famine and plagues also hit the world hard, and then the U.S. and the Soviet Union launch World War III. In the wasteland that remains, a bitchin car is a necessity for travel, but people also duel cars for sport. (And the game explains away that you can come back from being destroyed because of advances in cloning and memory "backups.")

The original Car Wars came in a ziploc bag full of rules and information, in 1981. You'd have a certain amount of "money" to spend on your car, and you could allocate it to armor, weapons, engine enhancements, and so on. Here's one fan's explanation of the problems with this points allocation system, which later banned tank guns.

(The game's maker, Steve Jackson Games, claims that a Swedish bus company's recent development of a bus with mini-electric engines in each wheel, fed by a central generator, may have been inspired by one of the enhancements you could add to your car, back in the early 1980s.)

Eventually Car Wars came out with a version for tanks and boats, and even allowed you to add airplanes to the mix. You roll dice to simulate combat, and each player gets to make ten moves per second, including moving, turning, and firing weapons. The more complicated your set of manoeuvres, the higher a score you'd have to roll on a six-sided die to pull off the whole shebang. You would need a rulebook (and a lot of brainpower) to figure out if someone sideswiped you or T-boned you, according to the game's FAQ. It could take hours to play out a few seconds of car-crashing action.

Depending on the size of the map you were playing on, you could use little game counters, Hot Wheels toys, or 1/25th scale miniatures to represent your super-cars.

The game spawned a lousy imitation, Batlecars, as well as a card game version and a computer game, Autoduel.

In the 2002 reissue of the game (which went nowhere), Steve Jackson reduced the amount of moves per second from ten to three, in an attempt to speed up the gameplay and make it less calculated. (And maybe a tad more realistic. Most people don't sit there and go, "Yeah, this second I'm going to honk my horn, and fire my rocket launcher, and turn 15 degrees to the left, and, uh...") The 2002 revision also tried to become quicker because you can only take four hits before your car is toast. But it was too late to bring people back to a dice-based game with mini-cars bashing the hell out of each other. Sadly.

Car chases are woven deep into the DNA of movies, says crime writer Elmore Leonard. We invented cars and movies at around the same time, and both experiences are about speed, exhilaration and technophilia. And you can't write a good car chase — you have to film it. With explosions and crazy weird vehicles. So here are our favorites:

Freejack (1992). Emilio Estevez is a racecar driver, who dies in a car crash. But he doesn't really die, he's kidnapped into the future so Anthony Hopkins can steal his body. Or something. It's all just a set-up for a giant car chase. You can tell it's the distant future because everybody has laptops with video-chat clients in their cars. How else could Estevez tell Jagger he couldn't catch the clap in a whorehouse? CB radio? I also love Jagger giving him driving tips via vid-chat. I want a video Mick Jagger critiquing my driving to be a standard feature in my next car.

Andy Gill, the stunt driver for Freejack also did all the driving for the original Knight Rider, and here are a couple of his favorite stunts:

Death Race 2000 (1975). David Carradine is a super-driver created by the world's greatest surgeons to drive the world's fastest car, which just happens to have jaggedy fake teeth. He's up against Sylvester Stallone in the world's most vicious race, where you win or die. Here's the trailer:

Mad Max: Road Warrior (1981). Mel Gibson is escorting a hella giant oil tanker across the wasteland of post-apocalyptic Australia. But a whole gang of New Wave savages with mohawks and spikes sticking out of their vehicles want to jack him. Crossbows, flaming projectiles, funny helmets and weird-looking machine guns are just some of the weapons they use to try and put Mel off his game, while he gets his swerve on.

Cyber Tracker (1994). Someone in law enforcement took RoboCop a little too seriously, and now all the cops are mean cyborgs. Plus an evil corporation wants to replace political leaders with bots. It's up to Don "The Dragon" Wilson to stop this mess, the only way he knows how... with car chases. Cyborgs are crazy driving fiends in this movie. At one point, a van hits Wilson's car, flips over in mid-air, soars about twenty feet up and then crashes and explodes. Wilson, of course, is unharmed. Cyber-crashes are just better than regular crashes. The shot is so awesome, it appears three different times in the movie's trailer:

Looker (1981). Michael Crichton directed his own weird story about an evil company that scans models and creates perfect computerized facsimiles of them... then disposes of the originals. The company also comes up with a weird hypno raygun that works like roofies... it temporarily blanks out your mind and makes you unable to remember your assailant afterwards. At one point, Albert Finney and a hit-man drive around chasing each other and trying to shoot each other with hypno-rays. D00d, it's drive-by hypno!

Total Recall (1991). This one is more comedy than anything else. Arnie is on the run, with a wet towel around his head to block the tracking device in his skull and a suitcase containing an important secret from Mars. To get way from the spooks chasing him, he steals a JohnnyCab, but first he has to disable the chirpy auto-driver and take control of the joystick steering. Here's the video:

Tomorrow, we'll have the greatest car chases of science fiction from the mid-90s onward. What are your favorites?

Death Race 2000, the original, was about a genetically engineered superdriver named Frankenstein (David Carradine), who is forced to compete in a race across the country where you can earn points by running down pedestrians, babies and the elderly, who are worth up to 100 bonus points! He's hell-bent on ending both the race and the life of "Mr. President." Pretty gritty stuff.

In the remake Jason Statham plays Frakenstein, but this time he's a family man trying to get out of prison and back to his daughter on the outside. Plus the Death Race now occurs in prisons, and on closed-circuit television. Talk about missing the point entirely, and with our current fixation on reality TV this should have been a no-brainer. It's like remaking Star Wars and having the Rebels and the Imperials sit down at a negotiating table and work things out nicely.

Director Paul W.S. Anderson, who is also helming the supercar movie Spy Hunter, will be directing this, giving us even more cause for concern. Do yourself a favor next year and rent the original. At least it wasn't afraid to put the pedal to the metal and run you down.