Film Review: Roadgames (Road Games, 1981)

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Few cinema industries experienced such spectacular boom like Australian cinema industry in 1970s. Before that decade Australian films were virtually unknown outside Australia. At the start of 1980s, Australian films were able to compete with Hollywood at the domestic and international box office and some, like Roadgames, 1981 thriller directed by Richard Franklin, even had Hollywood stars as part of their main cast.

In this film Stacy Keach plays Patrick Quid, American who earns his living as a truck driver in Australia. On his long hauls, accompanied only by a pet dingo, he fights monotony by playing various mental games in his head and imagining lives of various persons he encounters at the road. One evening he discovers that a female hitch-hiker apparently went to a motel with a mysterious and menacing driver of a green van (played by stuntman Grant Page). Next morning girl is nowhere to be seen and the green van driver takes unusual interest in local sanitation workers collecting garbage. After a while, Quid begins to suspect that the driver, whom he calls “Smith or Jones”, is actually a serial killer responsible for the series of gruesome murders of female hitch-hikers. While delivering shipment of meat from Melbourne to Perth, he has many encounters with “Smith or Jones”, but things get even more complicated when he picks another hitch-hiker Pamela “Hitch” (played by Jamie Lee Curtis), runaway daughter of an American diplomat. Along the way she disappears and Quid fears that “Smith or Jones” has kidnapped her and that he might become a suspect for her and other murders.

Roadgames was in its time the most expensive film in history of Australian cinema, but the audience wouldn’t notice that. Film, which is best described as combination of Spielberg’s Duel and Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Rear Window has relatively little action, small number of characters and the most locations are small and surrounded by vast expanses of arid Outback. Richard Franklin, Australian film maker who had been studying at UCLA with future stars of New Hollywood, nevertheless directs film with great skill, trying to give original treatment to Hitchcockian plot of “ordinary person in extraordinary situation”. Scriptwriter Everett De Roche opts for less action and more character exposition, adding a lot of black humour and specifically Australian flavour to the plot. One example can be found Australian trade unions being stronger than in other countries which allows Quid that, as independent contractor, exploit major strike and shortage of meat in Perth. There is more action at the finale, which feature very inventive slow speed three-way chase in the narrow streets, but actual ending is somewhat underwhelming. Keach, who plays the role originally written for Sean Connery, is very good and easily switches his character’s mood from humorpus playfulness into serious determination. Keach, which uses monologues as a very clever form of exposition, easily makes audience like and care about the protagonist. Jamie Lee Curtis, hired as bankable scream queen after her Halloween performance, is good but her presence as another American in the middle of Australian Outback looks a little bit too convenient and her role is somewhat underwritten. Composer Brian May, on the other hand, makes this film a little bit too epic with a bombastic score that takes too many cues from Holst’s “Mars”. Film ends with a rather unnecessary and pointless epilogue obviously brought in order to compensate fans of the gory horrors. Despite that, Roadgames is very interesting and very entertaining film that shows how Australian and other cinema industries can successfully apply lessons learned from Hollywood and its classics.

RATING: 7/10 (++)