Reporter J.J. wants to write a story about an Afrika rallye, 3000 km across desert and steppe. Unfortunately her driver and car get lost only days before the start, so she hires ex-stuntman Eddie and buys a wreck of a car from her last money. Eddie can help her to a new motor - by stealing it from the ruthless count Borgia, who from now on is their hardest and meanest competitor in the rallye.
Il Rally piu' pazzo d'Africa, Сафари 3000, Safari 3000 - Die Afrika Rallye
USAPG
USA
Cinematic Time Capsule
1982 Marathon - Film #103
The Racing Gods Must Be Crazy!
This blatant b-movie ripoff of Smokey and the Bandit features David Carradine and Stockard Channing in a Cannonball styled rally race through the African wilderness.
Now to be clear, my rating is probably higher than this silly film deserves, but I’m a self-admitted nostalgic sucker for these old-school sloppy race films. Besides, Channing’s energy and charisma steals the show and her fun-loving chemistry with Carradine helps to keep everything moving and watchable.
BONUS POINTS for Christopher Lee’s complete commitment to his evil Count Borgia character despite the fact he’s doing so while wearing the world’s goofiest Darth Vader inspired racing helmet.
”The fruits of victory are indeed sweet”
A forgettable attempt to emulate the look and feel of the Cannonball Run while fusing it with specific aspects of The Great Race, Safari 3000 squanders a somewhat decent premise (A Cannonball like rally across continental Africa) with dull characters, uninteresting setups and occasional "comedy."
David Carradine and Stockard Channing are our leads, and one of only two teams given even a modicum of thought or originality. A reporter and a stunt-driver, each wanting to win the race for their own reasons, they are pitted against Christopher Lee as Count Borgia and Hamilton Camp as his personal Renfield. The other teams, who have less than no character traits or stories, are simply differentiated by overblown accents or gender.
Christopher Lee…
David Carradine and Stockard Channing team up to race across the African continent in a three-day road-rally in Safari 3000. If the premise sounds a shade familiar, it might be because there are at least 5 other David Carradine continental road-race movies made between 1977-1982, the most notable being Deathrace 2000 and Cannonball. Here, Carradine is "Eddie Miles" a Hollywood stunt-driver, and Channing is "J.J. Dalton" an expose-reporter for Playboy Magazine. They team up so she can get the scoop, and he can have sweet revenge on the evil Count Borgia (Christopher Lee) who fired him as his personal rally-driver. It should be noted that Lee sports the craziest Darth Vader-inspired Helmet throughout the movie. There's a little forced-chemistry between…
My first true experience with the car racing madness which gripped the entertainment world in the mid-to-late ‘70s was getting to see The Gumball Rally in a school gym. (This is not to discount my youthful love of Wacky Races in any way, but that was a previous iteration of the same madness.) I don’t remember the context of why we were allowed to see the film, but just that it made its way to our school and my friends and I all got a much needed break watching what we thought then was a hilarious film. (Honestly, it could have been The Diary of Anne Frank, and we still would have had a good, riotous time, as long as…
After the couple of movies I had watched I needed a palate cleanser and SAFARI 3000 seemed like it might fit the bill. The rally movie was always a favorite of mine with all the fast cars and colorful characters, Much of my youth was spent watching THE CANNONBALL RUN(s), THE GUMBALL RALLY, CHECKERED FLAG OR CRASH and on and on. The problem is that they tend to age very poorly.
SAFARI 3000 was one I had never seen, or actually heard of, but it seemed like it had promise with Channing and Carradine as its leads. It does unfortunately stumbe into the same pit of stupidity that most of those movies do.
I knew I was in trouble when…
First REAL car movie of the Year!!!
First off, it's a movie-long race! You know it's going to be great.
The two main cars are mirror images of their drivers. A state-of-the-top, over-the-top, black unknown for the villain. And a rough-around-the-edges, in need of work, underdog hero. It's so perfect, it's cheesy.
The heroes pilot a Peugeot 514 rally car. It looks legit for a car that would race in Africa. I love it. This is a car I would love to own. A+
For the villain we have a Mitsubishi Galant with a stupid body kit. It gives off state of the art, but really it's shit.
The competitors all race in legit rally cars from the era. It's very cool to see them in action.
Beyond that, there are a lot of cool cars in the back ground. Keep an eye out for some awesome classics.
ACTIONx52 5/52
8. Watch an action film from the 1980s
The first scene really had me worried. Christopher Lee just got off set from another movie, presumably a Star Wars rip-off. He never changed wardrobe and I was worried this was a weird science fiction Death Race. What added to my concern were the two modified Mitsubishi's that look better suited in a post-apocalyptic desert action flick like Mad Max 2.
Thankfully, the rest of the movie feels much more grounded in reality with the cars and the race. The lead couple drives a beat up old Peugeot with a hopped up engine. Most of the competitors look like real safari cars that you'd race in Africa. The scenery is…
Genial Cannonball Run riff with Christopher Lee having a ball in the too-small role of our villainous aristocratic rally driver. David Carradine and Stockard Channing have pretty good chemistry and make it a feather-lite time. Shockingly for the time and the locale, not super-racist. Nothing that will keep you from nodding off on the sofa, but perfect if you need something to keep you going before you nap.
When I saw "Safari 3000" on Prime, with its cover art of a race car and a woman standing in the sunroof, I didn't look too closely. I just thought, hey, that looks like fun (knowing, based on my history, that it would likely be one of those films I watched 15 minutes of - or less - and then deleted from the queue in mild annoyance at poor transfer quality, insipid plotting, awful acting...there's a long list of potential causes for disdain in my head).
Five minutes in I had an epiphany, an oh-shit moment of realization that I had seen this film 40 years ago, and then wave after wave of memory and sheer unadulterated joy at the…
This is a pretty lackluster and restrained racing comedy compared to David Carradine's earlier outings in Death Race 2000 and Cannonball. The antics aren't all that zany. Stockard Channing is a welcome addition, but she has absolutely ZERO chemistry with Carradine, romantic or otherwise. It's kind of cool to see "Count" Christopher Lee in a Darth Vader helmet hinting at his eventual path towards the Sith, but that novelty wears off real quick. The best part is just basking in the weird era when they would make nonsensical B-pictures featuring racers blazing by African wildlife and interacting with the various indigenous tribes.
Homebound film fest 2021:
Goofy but fun comedy action film that sees magazine reporter Stockard Channing and Hollywood stunt driver David Carradine team up to drive across Africa (and fall in love) while fending off comic foils Christopher Lee (sporting half a Darth Vader helmet) and Hamilton Camp. That's pretty much it, though it's a nice travelogue of Africa, with lots of nature footage (actually filmed for the movie, not bought).
Channing and Carradine have an easy chemistry that pushes the movie along, and it's only a little 80's politically incorrect. Lee does the best with what he has to work with, but disappears for large portions of the film (he said he was cut out of much of the film). Overall, a fun little trifle.
I saw wildebeests, giraffes, elephants, baboons, rhinos, and lions; the laughs were no-shows.
