Film
In the year 2050 the planet has become overpopulated, to help control population the government has created the Death Race.
Join Frankenstein (Manu Bennett – The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug), Jed (Burt Grinstead), Tammy (Anessa Ramsey), Minerva (Folake Olowofoyeku), A.B.E (voiced by D.C. Douglas) and the Chairman (Malcolm McDowell) in Death Race 2050. A sub-par B rate movie, that will likely have you seeking death after watching it. If you even make it that far.
There is very little to say about this film, other than to just avoid it. The story is pretty straight forward, but so way over acted, that it borders on pantomime. The dialogue and characters are cringe-worthy, and with the added fact there one needs to actually use one’s imagination with some of the scientific jargon thrown about, means you’d be better off with almost any other B grade film.
Death Race 2050. Avoid it. At all costs.
Disc
Overall, the disc isn’t of such great quality, with the terrible main feature, and near indecipherable main menu, not to mention the low quality of the chapter selection sub-menu.
The main feature, as bad as the actual film is, has audio and video that aren’t too bad.
Roger Corman’s Death Race 2050 is available now, to purchase on disc, in South Africa.
Video
Video in the main is encoded at a decent average bitrate. Colours are vibrant, with no visible artefacts on screen, or visible colour bleed.
Viewers who wish, would be able to scale up to a larger or higher resolution screen.
Audio
Audio is encoded at a decent average bitrate, and presented in a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. Despite the weird and varied accents, that are often over acted, in the main feature, dialogue is still clear and understandable.
Navigation
Navigation is atrocious. Viewers are presented with five symbols, and then need to set about the task of guessing which small symbol would activate what function. Adding some simple text is not too difficult, so there is no excuse to rely on these, even if just using a pre-designed template for the DVD creation.
In short, a triangle plays the main feature. A book takes you to the chapter selection sub-menus. The astrix is for the bonus features sub-menu. Next is a speaker icon, to allow one to select the desired audio language on a sub-menu, and finally a page with lines is to access the subtitle menu.
The main menu has a bright which background, with a composite of characters to the right, and some background music. On the left are the symbols to access other menus, which are red. But instead of the actual symbol changing colour, there is a red underline showing the currently selected item. This could lead to some confusion on sub-menus, where text is black, the highlight underline is red, and the return symbol, or in the case of the chapters, the numbers, are red. Changing the actual symbol colour would have made more sense.
The chapter selection sub-menu is comprised of four large, but terribly compressed, and therefore distorted with artefacts, thumbnails, These are colour and numbered, but do not have labels, meaning navigation to a particular part of the main feature has some guesswork involved. Guesswork seems to be a theme on the DVDs navigation, so at least there is consistency.
The bonus features menu has text links to the few additional items on the disc. So this is at least easier to follow, once you find out which main menu item takes you here.
The audio sub-menu also has text items, as does the subtitle menu.
The sub-menus do timeout, taking one back to the main menu, which itself will eventually timeout, and play the main feature. So, if you are totally lost on the navigation, be patient, and it will start.
Bonus Features
The Making of Roger Corman’s Death Race 2050: Ten minutes of praise for the film, by the cast and crew. Mostly talking about how pleased they are to be working on the film, and then comparing the film to a mix of Mad Max combined with The Rocky Horror Show. At least the behind the scenes video isn’t as frustratingly overacted as the main film.
The Look of 2050: Director G.J. Echternkamp and producer Roger Corman talk about filming in South America, and the look of the cars and costumes, with some comment by the main cast.
Cars! Cars! Cars!: A video talking about the cars made for the film, and praising these, despite the fact that they look rather like toys. Find out a bit more about how each car is meant to be unique, and represent its driver.
Cast Car Tours: A sub-menu allowing access to videos where each cast member introduces their own car, namely Frankenstein, Jed, Tammy, Minerva and Abe. There is a playlist to play all in sequence. These provide a close-up look at the vehicles, but perhaps too close, as it becomes clear to see the materials they are made of. And these materials are not the same as what is stated by the cast or characters. Some of the cast don’t seem to know too much about their own vehicles either, which is probably not something that should be admitted on camera.
Deleted Scenes: A collection of ten deleted scenes. These can be played in sequence from a playlist, or accessed individually.
Trailers: There are trailers for Hard Target 2, Jarhead 3: The Siege, and Tremors 5: Bloodlines that autoplay at the beginning of the disc. These can be skipped or fast-forward individually. There is no menu item to access these again from the disc.
