Deathsport is a 1978 science fiction action sports B-film produced by Roger Corman and directed by Allan Arkush and Nicholas Niciphor.

"A thousand years from tomorrow" after the Neutron Wars, the world is divided into a barbaric collection of city states surrounded by wastelands where only mutant cannibals and independent warriors, known as Range Guides, can live.

Hoping to prove the superiority of their newest weapons, the Death Machines (laser-equipped dirt bikes), they create a new pastime - Deathsport.

In a Helix jail, Kaz Oshay bonds with Deneer and vows to escape with her and find the group's child.

After enduring torture and facing his mother's killer, Ankar Moor, Oshay and Deneer are forced onto the Deathsport motocross field, which is mined with explosives.

Finally safe, Deneer delivers Marcus to Tritan, while Oshay faces Ankar Moor in "honorable" combat, using Whistlers (swords that make a sound like music).

After a bloody battle, Oshay decapitates Ankar Moor, thus becoming the greatest Range Guide alive.

[2] Corman had a commitment with David Carradine to have him as a star under a five-picture contract that he had signed with the actor, and had gotten Charles B. Griffith to write a script.

[3] Allan Arkush, who worked at New World at the time, recalled Corman "offered it [the film] to everybody and nobody wanted to do it, because it was really half-baked and Death Race 2000 was a really good movie.

[6] Many locations around the Los Angeles area were used, including the famous Vasquez Rocks and Bronson Caves, both of which have appeared in many films and television episodes.

"The script was too ambitious, the shooting schedule too tight and...the crew and the cast were largely sodden with drugs.

As a director he was erratic and unknowing...The picture, which was brilliantly written, was unable to overcome the madness of the shoot".

[8] Niciphor countered these claims in a 1991 letter to Psychotronic Video magazine (Psychotronic Video #9) where he claimed that he and two stuntmen had physically removed Jennings from a motorcycle when Niciphor realized that she was drunk and apparently high on cocaine (Jennings had a well-known cocaine addiction in the late 1970s).

Niciphor went back to the set and completed the movie, in time for Carradine to leave and go film Circle of Iron (1978).

Carradine claimed that it was because the scenes involved filming explosions and Niciphor had PTSD from his experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War.

David Carradine...smoked a lot of high-grade weed and helped us to blow stuff up...Sad to say, I couldn't save the picture.