Last night I asked my husband to go pick up a movie for us to watch. As always, when I send him out to get a movie for “us” he comes back with some lame looking guy action movie with a hot chick on the cover. I rolled my eyes and settled in on the couch prepared to watch what I told him looked like a really stupid movie. Boy was I wrong. It was as if someone took all of the things I love about my favorite racing game and made it into a movie, except with a lot more blood, cursing, and hot chicks getting slashed in half while riding in fast moving death traps covered in steel and guns. Hit the jump to hear why I think that Death Race would make a great video game, if games were allowed to be that nasty.

Death Race stars Jason Statham (the cool guy from Transporter) who plays some guy that has landed himself in prison and is faced with the options of either racing in a death race where there is a 62.5% chance of him dying, or staying in jail where there’s a 100% chance of someone taking him out. So instead of staying and dying he gets to cruise around in a fast car with a hot chick from the chick prison as his navigator. The vehicles are covered in so many layers of steel that I’m amazed they’re practical to race. Deadly tactical weapons are slapped onto the hoods, and the rears feature an array of defensive items such as smoke, oil, napalm, and these little spiky star things that fall out, pop tires, and cause really cool crashes.

Sounds just like Full Auto, doesn’t it? “What’s Full Auto?”, you ask. Only the most amazing racing game ever made for the Xbox 360. The first scene of Death Race plays out exactly like a multiplayer match of Full Auto on Xbox Live. The movie is based off the original Death Race 2000 that came out in 1975 and was followed by the video game in 1976. I didn’t even realize that making games out of movies went back that far. The game was very controversial back then for the shameless killing of gremlins. I can only imagine what trouble a game made from the newer version of the movie would stir up.

In the movie the vehicles cruise around a lap before the weapons engage. In order arm your weapons you have to be the first to drive over either a sword symbol, which engages your tactical weapons, or a shield symbol that will engage your defensive weapons. If you aren’t the first to get to the symbol, you’re out of luck and you cruise around until someone kills you. If you do happen to make it out of the fiery car crash alive, watch out, odd are someone will drive by, open their car door, and decapitate you while you’re cheering in victory. There’s also a neat symbol that launches spikes out of the ground and into the car behind you causing instant death. I had never seen blood spurt out of a car before, and I have to tell you, it was awesome!

The hot navigator chick that rides in the cars with the convict drivers serves as more than just eye candy too. She tells the guys when there is a shortcut up ahead, and also comes in handy when your weapons don’t engage. Just send her out of the window while you’re driving to bang away at the jammed weapons with a wrench. There’s a lot more, but if I go too far into detail it would spoil the whole movie for you. If that doesn’t sound like a video game you’d want to play I don’t know what would.

The only thing that could have made the movie better for me is if I could have played it. Other than that the movie is great, and if you like racing games at all, Death Race is definitely a must see.

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