Sylvester Stallone has played some dodgy roles in his time. There’s no doubt the man is a screen legend, but his remarkable career is punctuated by some of the most questionable on-screen appearances in the history of cinema. While he’s not quite John Travolta, who has seven 0%-rated films on Rotten Tomatoes and has turned dodgy career choices into an art form, Stallone’s filmography features some truly surprising developments.
For one thing, Sly nearly played Batman opposite Mark Hamill in a fan film. On another occasion, Stallone featured in a bizarre Bollywood movie. Then there’s “Stop! Or my Mom will Shoot,” which, even if you’ve never seen it, bears a title that speaks for itself.
But there is no more interesting an era in Stallone’s show business career than his pre-“Rocky” years spent grinding out a living in New York City. The man famously jump-started his own career when he wrote the 1976 sports drama, blacking out the windows of his apartment and churning out a script in three days, then demanding he be cast in the lead role. Prior to the film’s debut, however, Stallone epitomized the struggling actor archetype. From cleaning out cages in the Central Park Zoo to sleeping at the Port Authority Bus Terminal for a short period while filming a softcore sexploitation film named “The Party at Kitty and Stud’s,” he more than paid his dues. But not every role he played before inhabiting the Italian Stallion was as dire as “Stud.” For one thing, this era gave us one of Stallone’s few performances as a villain in the cult classic “Death Race 2000.”
Death Race 2000 was Stallione’s biggest pre-Rocky role
In 1975, B-movie maestro Roger Corman produced “Death Race 2000,” a film that featured an array of stars and soon-to-be stars, including David Carradine and, of course, Sylvester Stallone. The movie was directed by Paul Bartel and produced on a budget of about $300,000. But the project turned out to be one of many low-budget sci-fi movies that made millions, bringing in more than $5 million at the global box office by the end of its theatrical run.
Not that the film’s commercial success was any indicator of its overall quality. “Death Race 2000” became a cult hit and has experienced increasingly favorable critical reactions in the years since it debuted. But it’s also unabashedly schlocky, depicting a dystopian future in which drivers compete in a cross-country rally during which they’re encouraged to kill and maim pedestrians and each other to claim victory. Whether you interpret the thing as some sort of searing satire of Hollywood or as a bit of fun, mindless nonsense very much depends on your sensibilities. Still, for Stallone, who’d been slumming it as a background actor for most of the 70s, this was his biggest project to date.
The actor played Joe “Machine Gun” Viterbo, a driver in the titular race who wants to take out Carradine’s “Frankenstein” and claim victory for himself. Bartel was evidently impressed with Stallone’s performance in 1974’s “The Lords of Flatbush,” in which he played a rebellious young Brooklynite. Corman was similarly won over when Stallone came in to audition. As the producer remembered in a making-of documentary (via the Telegraph), “As soon as he read, I said this man is the best heavy I’ve ever seen. I said at that time, ‘I don’t see him as a leading man. He’s just a good heavy.'” Talented though the man was, prescience clearly wasn’t one of Corman’s attributes, as just a year after “Death Race 2000” debuted, Stallone would become one of the biggest new stars in Hollywood.
Death Race is Sylvester Stallone’s best villain performance
Sylvester Stallone would charm his way to stardom as the underdog pugilist Rocky Balboa in 1976. But as Joe “Machine Gun” Viterbo, he was “the roughest tough guy of them all” — a gangster who drove a convertible outfitted with machine guns in the headlights, which he would use to mow down crowds of innocent people. That, coupled with the middling reviews for “Death Race 2000,” didn’t exactly endear audiences to Stallone in 1975 — not that it made much difference in the long run.
In the years since “Death Race,” Stallone has steered well clear of villain roles and is clearly aware of his appeal as a good guy action star. He didn’t venture into villainy again until 2003’s “Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over,” in which he played a former agent turned supervillain known as The Toymaker. That didn’t exactly do much to convince the masses of his talent for playing the bad guy. Unlike Denzel Washington, who sparked controversy when he played an antagonist for the first time in 2001’s “Training Day” before wowing audiences with his range, Stallone could never really pull off the whole bad guy thing — as evidenced by his performance in 2024’s “Armor,” which added another 0% Rotten Tomatoes score to Sly’s filmography. Whatever else you think about it, then, “Death Race 2000” stands as Stallone’s best villain performance.
Years later, Stallone’s buddy and “Expendables” co-star Jason Statham starred in a 2008 remake of “Death Race 2000” directed by Paul W. S. Anderson. The film didn’t fare too well critically and wasn’t half as stupidly fun as the original. Perhaps a Stallone appearance might have added something to proceedings, but Joe “Machine Gun” Viterbo was killed off in the first movie, which would essentially make such a thing impossible. Considering the man has built a career out of being the likable leading man, that’s probably for the best.
Interestingly enough, it seems Stallone wasn’t quite as agreeable behind the scenes of “Death Race 2000” as you might think. According to the Telegraph, the actor kicked up a fuss over a scene in which he was required to reveal his rear end, forcing Roger Corman and his crew to compromise and throw a towel over his posterior. As much as “Death Race” wasn’t Stallone’s big break, he at least wasn’t going to revisit his “The Party at Kitty and Stud’s” days.