If you didn’t know that Nicholas Niciphor’s Deathsport was released in 1978, you’d swear it was one of the many rip-offs of Mad Max 2 (1981). In fact, it started life as a sequel to Paul Bartel’s infinitely better Death Race 2000 (1975) but quickly transforms – some might say deteriorates – into something much less interesting. Sadly it’s not a patch on Bartel’s film – it’s so awful in fact that returning star David Carradine later said in his book Endless Highway that “my career never really fully recovered from that blunder.”

“A thousand years from tomorrow” the world has been changed forever by the “Neutron Wars.” Cannibalistic mutants roam the wastelands, kept in check by the Range Guides while two of the city states that have sprung up in the aftermath, Helix and Tritan, are on the edge of war with each. Lord Zirpola (David McLean), leader of Helix, has developed a new weapon, a fleet of hi-tech motorcycles called the Death Machines, testing their battle readiness in a series of gladiatorial combats known as Deathsport. Zirpola’s troops capture Range Guides Kaz Oshay (Carradine) and Deneer (Playboy Playmate turned exploitation film actor Claudia Jennings) and force them to take part in Deathsport, watched over by Zirpola and his henchman Ankar Moor (Richard Lynch), the man who killed Oshay’s mother. Oshay and Deneer escape, rescue a child kidnapped by mutant cannibals and prepare for a final standoff with Moor and the Helix regime.

Deathsport was a hugely troubled production. Nicophor, who opted to use the pseudonym Henry Suso, clashed repeatedly with Carradine who had recently worked with Ingmar Bergman on The Serpent’s Egg (1977) and had little interest in returning to the Roger Corman stable. Nicophor was unable to deal with the cast and crew who were, allegedly, out of their heads on drink and drugs – you can actually see Jennings visibly spaced out in several shots. Allan Arkush, co-director with Joe Dante of Hollywood Boulevard (1976), was parachuted into salvage what he could and ended up shooting many of the action scenes.

That the resulting film is a mess then should come as no surprise to anyone. It lacks the satire of Death Race 2000 and replaces it instead with reams of ridiculous cod-philosophical musings and meaningless epithets (“like sand in the wind, keep moving”) that are more embarrassing than insightful. Nicophor, who also wrote the script, seems to mistake this for actual personality and presumably he thought was good enough to keep audiences engaged with the otherwise one-dimensional characters. Carradine comes of worst here – one suspects that Nicophor was aiming for the kind of mystical warrior-sage that Carradine had played in the television series Kung Fu (1972-1975), but he missed by a mile. Where Death Race 2000 had been funny, with some great one-liners, Deathsport is relentlessly po-faced and hilariously earnest.

Claudia Jennings is under-used which is doubly tragic as she was killed, aged just 29, in a traffic accident after just one more film which, with a horrible sense of irony, was David Cronenberg’s car-racing themed Fast Company (1979). Richard Lynch does what Richard Lynch does best, chewing the scenery with considerable gusto, and his viciously nasty Ankar Moor is about the only wholly entertaining thing about the film.

Though might get a laugh or two from the awful mutants with their ping pong eyes and the sloppy continuity that makes it next to impossible to keep track of where everyone is, particularly during the Deathsport battles where no two shots ever seem to match – in some long shots, there’s a large city in the background with banks of spectators while in mid and close shots, there are mountains instead. The motorcycles used during these gladiatorial bouts are a crushing disappointment – they’re meant to be terrifying war machines, new weapons for a forthcoming war, but they’re really just standard issue trail bikes tarted up with a few plastic boxes and tubes glued on and overdubbed with an annoying shining sound. They couldn’t be any less like the hugely impressive cars in Death Race 2000 which are little marvels of no-budget ingenuity.

Given its mystical warrior cult, black-clad villains, sand-dwelling mutant creatures, old-fashioned scene transitions and glass swords that were probably meant to be lightsabers, it’s fairly clear that Deathsport was really more about Star Wars (1977) than it was about Death Race 2000 or other films of its ilk, like Rollerball (1975). But this was a Roger Corman film so there was no money for anything more visually exciting than a few slow-motion exploding dirt bikes and Deathsport remains resolutely and grimly earthbound. Corman made back some of his minuscule outlay when he licensed footage from the film to be included in Baker’s Dozen, the 19 October 1983 episode of the Lee Majors-starring TV series The Fall Guy (1981-1986).

Attempts to position the film as a sequel to Death Race 2000 were obviously abandoned very early on (in pre-production it seems) as there are no mentions of the events of the earlier film and Carradine is playing a completely different character. An official sequel, Death Race 2050 was released in 2017, by which time Paul W.S. Anderson had remade Bartel’s film as Death Race (2008) which itself had a number of sequels – Death Race 2 (2010), Death Race 3: Inferno (2013) and Death Race: Beyond Anarchy (2018).