A follow-up of sorts to the film Death Race 2000 (1975), this film's failure at the box office scrapped all of the plans for a second follow-up film that would have been titled "Deathworld".
The cave scenes in the film with the mutants were shot at Bronson Caves in Bronson Canyon. When a stuntman playing a mutant was set on fire, another actor portraying a mutant was also accidentally set on fire.
The film's original director, Nicholas Niciphor a.k.a. Henry Suso, was a USC film student who had made some excellent short films. He had been in an agent's office pitching himself in order to get representation, when the agent called Roger Corman. As it turns out, Corman and others at New World Pictures had seen and enjoyed Niciphor's short films and Niciphor subsequently got hired to do a re-write for, and direct, Deathsport.
One of the reasons why the film's original director, Nicholas Niciphor, was fired from it was because he repeatedly clashed with its stars, David Carradine and Claudia Jennings. At one point, Carradine broke his nose in an on-set altercation.
At one point during filming, Claudia Jennings had to be physically removed from the set, as she was drunk and high on cocaine (she had a well-documented cocaine addiction at the time).