If you were to tell me back in August that a Paul W.S. Anderson remake of a Roger Corman camp action classic would prove to be one of my favorite films of the year, I would have given you the stink eye something fierce. Anderson doesn't make great films, I would have told you. He used to make fun films, but he doesn't even make those anymore. And of course I would have been wrong. Death Race, as it turns out, is one of my very favorite things to come out last year. Not the best. Please don't misunderstand my words and think that I'm saying it's the best. Even mentioning this among such titles as Slumdog Millionaire and Frost/Nixon is likely to get you hung in certain counties.

No. Death Race is one of my favorite movies from last year. It is a film that knows exactly what it is. When Anderson, a big fan of the original, sat down to reimagine it, he boiled it down to the elements that made him love it as a teenager. Blood, cars and hot women. So that's what he tried to do here. And boy howdy did he succeed. Death Race is an unrepentantly glorious classic of exploitation that took the concept of the original -- a cross country road rally chock full of ultra-violence -- and crossed it with NASCAR. Setting it in a prison and forcing the drivers and pit crews to assemble the vehicles themselves kept the look and feel away from ultra-sleek cars, grounding it more in a gritty, raw, Road Warrior-esqe world.

Is it a smart film? Oh, God no. It's as dumb as they come. But it is fun every second that it's on the screen. Anderson puts good character actors together and lets them chew up the scenery like never before. When he steals scenes, he doesn't lift them from lame films -- he rips off the classics. Shawshank Redemption sees so much play here that it's not even funny. And he uses these moments of theft to their fullest, milking every bit of emotion he can out of them before putting two-ton hunks of metal onto the road and having them slam into each other over and over again.

Sadly, the DVD is a little lacking. With only two special features -- one a 20-minute making-of and the other a stunt-focused featurette -- in addition to the bloodier unrated version, there isn't much to have fun with outside of the film. What those features do, however, is put you in touch with what is so impressive about this film. While it's easy to think that Anderson is somewhat out of touch with audiences, he managed to find the pulse of the action crowd and glean from them a very important notion -- that we're getting kind of sick of CG. He (like many of us) found that it's hard to be amazed by a stunt when you know that no one actually performed it. So he went back to roots filmmaking, shooting this with as little CG as possible.

Every car that crashes in this movie really crashes. When a tractor-trailer up-ends and guys are thrown off of it -- it really happened. Every bullet you see firing out of the guns was really loaded in there. And all that effort pays off in a wonderfully delicious exploitation sundae that looks and feels authentic -- even though it's about prisoners driving souped-up death machines on national television.

Despite the lack of features, this was the one disc I really wanted for Christmas and finally got. Death Race is available now from Universal Studios Home Entertainment.