Several reviews back, I was in the midst of diving into a round of Ozploitation flicks and in my research of notable titles, Roadgames kept coming up. So, I had it earmarked as one of the next flicks from Down Under that I’d be checking out but alas, the streaming gods conspired against me and it looked like if I was to stay true to my Must See list, I was going to have to make a sacrifice to Jeff Bezos and score a new hardcopy online, which is not something I’m a big fan of if I haven’t seen the flick yet. So, there was hesitation, then there was forgetting about it, as I found myself inevitably distracted by other content. I figured my delving into the Cinema of Australia had perhaps come to an unceremonious end and began pondering what genre I should pour myself into next. But then the wife scored us a new modem package that yielded Tubi to our disposal and lo and behold, one day as I was just checking out titles they were offering, there was Roadgames, just waiting for this Audience of One.
So, on yet another early Sunday morning, coffee in one hand, pen and paper in the other…I plunked myself down to see what this little Aussie thriller had to offer.
Roadgames follows an American long-haul trucker named ‘Pat Quid’ (Stacy Keach) as he works the highways of southern Australia. One night, he encounters a shady van, noting the mysterious driver and a lone female hitchhiker, as they all turn up at the same motel. Something ‘off’ catches ‘Quid’s eye, but he can’t put his finger on it. The next morning, having been forced to sleep in his rig, he sees more suspicious behaviour on the part of the van owner. There’s also no trace of the hitchhiker. His urge to investigate is dampened by an emergency call from his dispatch and he leaves to secure a trailer-load of butchered pigs for transport from Melbourne to Perth. Along the way, he encounters several odd characters and vehicles all traveling in the same direction. Among these characters is ‘Pamela’ (Jamie Lee Curtis), a sexy young hitchhiker, who coincidentally happens to also be a fellow Yank, who he picks up. As they travel, they take stock of the activities of the strange green van that first attracted ‘Quid’s attention, which appear more and more sinister and soon enough, more and more threatening. A deadly cat and mouse game ensues.
I hit play…and scribbles also ensued.
–Brian May? First Mad Max connection. Given how small the Australian film industry was at the time, it would make sense to see familiar names from other Oz films reappear, feature to feature. Here its composer Brian May (not world-renowned guitarist Brian May from Queen, as I moronically once thought), who crafted the insane musical soundscapes for Aussie classics Mad Max (1979) and its terrific sequel Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, incidentally also in 1981, among others. Another connection was Australian actor Steve Millichamp, who played Main Force Patrol cop ‘Roop’ in the first Mad Max, and who turns up here playing…you guessed it…another cop.
–Nothing better happen to that dog! This is the first thought that shot through my mind when ‘Quid’s travelling companion, a domesticated dingo named ‘Boswell’, was introduced.
–Why the hell did the windshield shatter? One character that turns up is a dork credited as ‘Captain Careful’ (Bill Stacey), who is towing a small boat on a trailer and who turns up a few times along the way. For some reason, when he gets passed by the mysterious van and then by ‘Quid’, his windshield abruptly shatters. I think we’re supposed to think that a rock thrown from ‘Quid’s tire nuked the glass, but we’re never shown the cause or given an explanation.
–Oddly playful tone around Keach. ‘Quid’ is an interesting character, given to spontaneous bouts of poetry or odd conversations with Boswell, but through it all, he comes across as genuinely decent, with a slightly cynical sense of humor.
–Yea lady…I don’t think so. So, just climbing on in, are we? At one point, ‘Quid’ is forced to nail the brakes and bring his full-sized rig to a screeching halt. Barely stopped, his passenger door suddenly opens and this middle-aged woman just invites herself in, expecting ‘Quid’ to chauffer her to where she expects her husband to be miles up the road. And he goes with it!
–Dude! Let her go! ‘Quid’ and the obnoxious and uninvited hitcher ‘Frita’ (Marion Edward) get into a conversation about news reports of a serial killer leaving body parts in locations along the highway and somehow her suspicions suddenly fall on him and she bolts. For some reason, he pursues and catches her at the edge of a cliff over looking the ocean, where a strange confrontation breaks out and ‘Frita’ nearly takes a header into the drink. Now, when I scrawled ‘Let her go!’, I did not mean to let her plummet to a rocky and watery death, more just ‘You wanna run off into the desert? Ok, bye!’, especially since she was the uninvited one.
–Buddy sure got that windshield fixed fast. This whole story takes place over the span of about a day or so, and as previously mentioned, some characters make repeat performances. One such character is ‘Captain Careful’, who is then encountered at a gas station and who’s previously shattered (and I mean completely destroyed) windshield is now miraculously unmarred. Must have some serious auto insurance and those scattered Outback repair shops must be amazing
–Dude with the boat. WTF?! For some reason, ‘Captain Careful’ embarks on a campaign of swerving and brake-checking ‘Quid’ as he tries to pass him in pursuit of the mysterious van. I couldn’t tell if this was a coincidental accident or was he deliberately being a dick. Either way, this doesn’t end well, and the ‘Captain’s boat gets launched from its trailer and onto the highway, completely annihilated.
–Title makes even more sense now. Clever even. Keach and Curtis’ first chat. One thing that we see about ‘Quid’ is his use of games to pass the time and during a conversation with ‘Pamela’ about the killer in the news, they use guessing games to speculate on the motives and methods.
-‘Grunt!’?! Haha! Porn mag. There’s a scene where the rig gets pulled over and while ‘Quid’ is outside getting the third degree from the red-neckish cops, ‘Pamela’ hides out in the rig’s sleeper compartment. As she notices ‘Quid’s’ pile of culturally-elevated literature, she comes across a porn magazine hilariously named ‘Grunt!’. Now who knows, back in the days of-hard copy jerk-rags, there were so many that maybe this one was somehow real, but it just cracked me up when revealed.
-‘Pamela’? But credited as ‘Hitch’? During the intro credits, Jamie Lee Curtis is credited as ‘Hitch’. I figured that there wouldn’t be a reveal of her actual name but I was wrong, as about halfway through, there’s a quiet moment where she very deliberately informs ‘Quid’ that her name is NOT ‘Hitch’, as he’s nick-named her, but instead her actual name is ‘Pamela’. He even says her name later in the flick, so I was curious and a little confused about that credit.
–The whimsical score at odds with the tone. There were a few times where Brian May’s score came across as more playful and ‘innocent’ than the narrative would suggest and I wished that he’d opted for something a but more low-key and atmospheric.
–Just don’t. Keep it chaste, for a change. A couple times, they bring up the fact that ‘Quid’ is a dude in his mid-40’s and ‘Pamela’ is definitely at least 20 years his junior and for a good while, it seemed like the narrative might just make the attempt to not have them fall into some creepy lust / love scenario, as every other movie of this type seems to have main characters do. But even as they continue to try to paint ‘Quid’ as a decent bloke, they have Jamie Lee, clearly with a thing for older dudes, start getting a little more forward and suggestive than I thought was necessary and, in the end, a romantic connection is solidly (and annoyingly) hinted at. Take Jamie Lee’s turn from John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) and just change the locale. Almost exactly the same.
-“You miserable stink?” In the can. I guess this childish insult was appropriate, given that it was being yelled through the door of a toilet stall as the occupant was pinching a loaf.
–Path of destruction. How American. When the opportunity arises, ‘Quid’ sets out in pursuit of the van and in doing so, causes much damage and ruckus with his 18 wheeler, not once stopping to make sure no ones been hurt of killed in his wake.
–Uh oh. Talking to himself. And responding. There are several scenes where ‘Quid’ is either talking to Boswell or himself but as the narrative unspools, there are moments when we hear, through Voice-over, him actually responding back to himself, as though a different person.
–Something very ‘Duel’-like. Steven Spielberg’s debut feature, 1971’s under-rated Duel, in which a mild-mannered businessman on a road trip is set upon by a mysterious and sinister fuel truck that tracks him across the desert. There was a similar tone here, only in this case, the ‘victim’ was the trucker and the potential antagonist was the ‘civilian’.
–THAT may not be swine, Keach. There’s a scene toward the 3rd Act where ‘Quid’, while investigating an open door on the trailer he’s hauling, climbs inside the reefer and comes across some possible evidence of tampering with his load of slaughtered pigs. I THOUGHT I might’ve been seeing the butchered remains of a female body hanging among the carcasses but now I’m not so sure, given how things play out.
–Haha! Taillights to red eyes. As the tensions rise, we are treated to a hallucinatory sequence where ‘Quid’ is racing through the night and the lack of sleep and the increase in stress begins working on him in trippy ways. One of the shots we get has the van’s taillights from up ahead reflected on the rig’s windshield and as we watch, the pinpoints of red move to fill Keach’s frantic eyes. It was a simple and obvious trick but it worked in the moment.
–Some nice and inventive cinematography. This applies to the flick as a whole, not just the David Lynchian scenes of hallucination and madness.
–I swear THIS score is Holst. As events hurtle toward climax, I swear that one key piece of score was either heavily influenced by or straight up stolen from one of Holst’s The Planets collection of classical music.
–And another American path of destruction. ‘Quid’s at it again, crashing, scraping and crushing any number of things in his way as he again pursues the suspect vehicle, this time into the city of Perth.
–Oh, I think you’re fucked, Keach! As everything comes to a head, it quickly comes to appear that ‘Quid’ stands a very good chance of becoming law enforcement’s Suspect Number One in the case of the missing women and the scattered body parts. But…!
–Or not. But…how the hell did the cops miss THAT?! In the end, *SPOILER* all’s well that ends well for our heroes, despite the fact that a Se7en-like ending here would’ve been great, where the scuzzy and mysterious killer outsmarts the vigilante trucker and gets him busted for his gruesome crimes. And in typical 80’s slasher fashion, there’s a stinger where ‘Quid’s trailer, somehow NOT confiscated by the cops, is being cleared out of its frozen meat cargo at its destination and a woman who is cleaning the container’s floor, suddenly, from out of nowhere, has another woman’s severed head (the one from the beginning) drop suddenly out of thin air and into her wash bucket. Apparently this cheap-shock final scene was not the choice of director Richard Franklin, with him finding it to be a tasteless addition courtesy of the producers.
And that was Roadgames.
All in all, Roadgames was just fine, for what it was. Personally, I would’ve preferred a bit more ‘teeth’ to the violence (one of my favorite films ever is 1986’s amazing serial killer flick The Hitcher, to give you an idea of my preferred tone) and a bit more interaction with the creepy antagonist. Stacy Keach is not an actor I’m terribly familiar with, but I liked the nuances and humor he brought to the embattled character of ‘Quid’. Then there’s Jamie Lee Curtis. Now, I think this woman is great and have always found her entertaining on film. That being said, I’m thinking she was miscast, as there was no reason for the character of ‘Pamela’ to be American. Having two Yanks as leads in a through-and-through Aussie joint took me out of the exotic locale and it just felt like it might as well be taking place somewhere in Middle America, until a background player spoke up with that charmingly lazy-sounding lilt that Aussies effortlessly employ. The character should’ve been Australian, to further off-set ‘Quid’s blatant American-ness and I can very much believe the stories of Jamie Lee being harassed on by members of the crew who were bitter about two Yanks in the lead of their very Australian thriller. Taking that into account, it’s actually a bit surprising how little she’s onscreen in the 1 hour and 41 minute run-time. But, it is what it is.
That being said, this flick is by no means bad and actually boasts a few inventive scenes of tension and suspense. The tone is a little muddled, with some odd additions of questionable humor tossed in, but overall, it’s a lean little example of Ozploitation and if you’re a fan of that particular sub-genre, then I can easily recommend Roadgames for a viewing.
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