Death Race sounds as appealing as rehashed roadkill.

A retrofit of Roger Corman's 1975 Death Race 2000 from the director of the shrill, lobotomized Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil franchises? Someone throw me under the bus already.

But shock of shocks (or shlock of shlocks, rather), this Death Race doles out disreputable damage with such bone-crushing, heavy-metal conviction that you can almost smell the napalm, nitro and diesel fumes.

There's no pretense here -- even the satire is as sophisticated as an Alabama bumper sticker -- but if I'm forking over my gas money to see chases, crashes, booby-traps and body counts, I probably wasn't in the mood for Pride and Prejudice anyway.

Director-screenwriter Paul W.S. Anderson -- who shouldn't be mistaken for Paul Thomas Anderson of Boogie Nights and Magnolia fame -- admittedly jettisons all traces of logic and half-decent taste along the way, and really, can you think of a reason he wouldn't?

Should a movie entitled Death Race -- based on a "cult classic" that saw David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone mowing down pedestrians for points -- even attempt to make sense?

In many ways, the project would seem to fit Anderson like a pair of driving gloves, what with his aptitude for extreme gore, over-stimulated camerawork and near-incomprehensible thrash-metal action.

But Race also possesses a stripped-down virility (some might say viciousness) and an embarrassment of astute casting choices, both of which elevate his material.

Chief among them? The hiring of this generation's pre-eminent B-movie marquee star, Jason Statham (The Transporter, Crank).

Twenty-five years ago, Golan-Globus and the Cannon Group would have signed this rock-hard Cockney bruiser to a 30-picture deal.

Or better yet, some canny studio executive would have paired him with a still-in-his-prime John Carpenter (Ghosts of Mars, in which the actor appeared, doesn't count). Yet unlike some 1980s icons, Statham can also act when he's not head-butting opponents into oblivion, as anyone who saw this year's underrated The Bank Job knows.

Here he's Jensen Ames, a race-car driver wrongly jailed for murdering his wife. The year, if you were wondering, is 2015 and the U.S., its economy in tatters, has privatized the prison system.

These corporations, in turn, have transformed penitentiaries into post-modern gladiatorial arenas, pitting inmates against each other and streaming it online to blood-thirsty subscribers.

Unlike The Road Warrior, which posited that such a brutal landscape was only imaginable following a nuclear war, Death Race instead cynically envisions a post-apocalyptic fantasy in which the world ended but no one noticed. Or cared.

Vehicular homicide is merely the engine of the new America's sputtering economy.

The chief architect of this blood-sport is Hennessey (Joan Allen, one-half Strother Martin and one-half Hillary Clinton), the thin-lipped warden of Terminal Island, the maximum-security slammer where Jensen is incarcerated. Once inside, he is offered the chance to impersonate the race's most feared and revered driver -- "Frankenstein."

If he wins, he'll be released early -- his only chance at avenging his wife's murder and reuniting with their child.

Anderson, a wise man who knows how to "motivate the base" as they say in politics, even offers up a piston-hot "navigator" (Natalie Martinez, whose most resonant line of dialogue is "Go right!") as ejection-seat eye-candy.

The discombobulated violence that ensues is nihilistic, gratuitous and numb-skulled -- perfect for an action fossil that, despite its near-future setting, is all pre-CGI, pre-eco-friendly horsepower.

(This film is rated 18-A)
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