Road Games (1981)

A suspenseful souffle cooked up by Richard Franklin, Stacy Keach and a serial killer with a taste for butchering

"I'm not fond of bloodletting on screen unless it has a real purpose," says the director of Road Games, Richard Franklin. "I'd much rather imply something. I liked the idea of the meat going to the supermarket and being sold with the possibility that two of the pieces of meat might have been long pig."

Road Games is a fine movie, a clever and often amusing film packed with creepy suspense and the possibility of unpleasantness just beyond our field of vision. It was sold as something it wasn't, a simple-minded slasher movie, and it never found its right audience. "I'm really quite proud of Road Games," says Franklin. "I think the film works very well as what Hitchcock would have referred to as a `soufflé.' He called North by Northwest a soufflé. Road Games is full of air but I think it rises very nicely and I'm very happy with it."

Think of Rear Window on wheels, something Franklin points out to us. Pat Quid (Stacy Keach) drives a huge, 22-wheel long-haul refrigerator truck ("Just because I drive a truck doesn't make me a truck driver."). He's a smart guy with a big imagination...talks a lot, usually to himself...has a part-Dingo dog named Boswell as a companion. He speculates about the people he encounters on the road. He's just picked up a load of 30 butchered hog sides in Adelaide to be delivered to Perth. It's going to be a long, straight, lonely haul across the desolate Nullarbor Plain. And then he notices for a second time a green van that was parked at a motel where he stopped over night in Adelaide before loading the hogs. He saw the man earlier pick up a hitchhiker. The next morning Boswell intensely investigated a couple of overstuffed bags set out on the street for trash pickup.

For most of the movie Pat keeps encountering this green van. He picks up a hitchhiker himself, a young woman he nicknames "Hitch" (Jamie Lee Curtis). He winds up convincing himself that the driver of the green van is the serial killer people are talking about...a serial killer who likes to use a garrote to start things off and then a knife to make the final product more compact for disposal. When Hitch disappears at a road stop where the green van was parked, Pat's not sure what to do. It all comes together in a screeching, scraping climax when Pat guns his huge truck late at night down the dark, ever narrowing streets of Perth in pursuit of the green van. He's almost sure Hitch is in that van, and may be alive. When the van finally stops, Pat and his truck are jammed tight. A man gets out of the van and walks toward Pat with a steel shovel in his hands. Pat can't get the doors of his cab open. He's just going to have to sit there. But maybe not.

Although Jamie Lee Curtis does a great job as Hitch, this is Keach's movie. Curtis is on camera perhaps a quarter of the time. Her character is smart, inquisitive and no weakling. She's a good match for Pat Quid's words, imagination and suspicions. But it's Keach who provides the narrative and the character that keeps us hooked. He gives us a likeable guy, no genius, and someone we could see getting so caught up in his own stories that he might make some really wrong assumptions. Richard Franklin, with Keach, have managed to give us an exciting, suspenseful and amusing story that, however unlikely, spends a lot of time in the cab of a long-haul truck driving through lonely territory.

Of course, it helps when Franklin gives us things to think about...such as why there were 30 hog sides when Quid left Adelaide and there were 32 when he got to Perth...and why two of the serial killer's bodies were never found...and just how sweet will be those pork chops that the house wives in Perth are buying to cook for their families.

It's time Road Games was discovered again. It's a first-rate soufflé.

The DVD transfer looks fine. There is a pleasant on-camera interview about the making of the movie with Franklin and Keach and a commentary by Franklin. September 20, 2008

Oldie but goody

Keach plays Quid, a truck driver delivering pork to Perth, Australia. He beats the boredom of the road by looking at other cars and the people inside them and guessing their line of work, etc. He gets too accurate with his game when a serial killer picking up hitchhikers and leaving them in pieces crosses Quid's path. Keach's character is witty and has more personality than most portrayals of truck drivers. A young Jamie Lee Curtis teams up with Quid and together they try to find out if their guessing game about the strange man in the green van is fact or fiction. When Pamela (Jamie Lee Curtis) gets too close to the killer she nearly becomes a victim herself. Great dialogue, humor and numerous quirky characters.

Chrissy K. McVay - Author February 25, 2007

For Once, A GOOD Australian Movie!!!(That's A Nice Change!!!

In this movie we see Stacey Keach playing a truck driver on his way to Adelaide via the Nullabor Plain. The word "Nullabor" is an abbreviation of the Latin "Nulla Arbor" which means "no trees" which from what I have heard is a pretty good description of this place. Stacey picks up hitchiker Pamela , played by Jamie Lee Curtis and then they are on the hunt for a Serial Killer who likes to slice and dice his victims. In this movie Stacey Keach gets the award for Best Dressed Truck Driver Of The Year because most truckers in Austraia wear shorts and a singlet as their working atire. He is also commended for not taking any "West Coast Turnaround" amphetamines to keep him awake on the road!!! June 20, 2005

Nice little masterpiece

This is one of those movies that gets sorely overlooked because it doesn't pander to the slasher & gore genre ,in true classic horror movie fashion it let's your own imagination do most of the work.You get drawn into the characters because they never seem pretentious or one dimensional ,this is also very much in the Hitchcok vein, so if you are looking for something a little different w/thought instead of gore this is the ticket. May 9, 2005

One more Jamie Lee Curtis horror flick makes it to DVD!

oOkay, this isn't so much horror as super suspense. Jamie Lee doesn't even appear in the first half of the movie. Stacy Keach spends the time driving across country trying to get away from some unseen psycho in a truck. But after he picks up Jamie Lee, you really feel like you've entered a classic Jamie Lee slasher flick!

This movie is a must for Slasher/Scream Queen fanatics. April 16, 2005

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