Road Games
by Richard Franklin
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Grant Page, Jamie Lee Curtis, Marion Edward, Stacy Keach, Thaddeus SmithDirector: Richard Franklin
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 101 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-06-10
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Starz / Anchor Bay
Movie Reviews of Road Games
Movie Review: A suspenseful souffle cooked up by Richard Franklin, Stacy Keach and a serial killer with a taste for butchering
Summary: 4 Stars
"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 `souffl?.' He called North by Northwest a souffl?. 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 souffl?.
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.
Summary of Road Games
Stacy Keach is Pat Quid, a lone trucker who plays games to keep his sanity on long hauls through the desolate Outback. Jamie Lee Curtis is a free-spirited hitchhiker looking for excitement with a game of her own. And somewhere up ahead is a maniac in a van whose game may be butchering young women along the highway. But when the killer decides to raise the stakes, Quid's game becomes personal.and the rules of this road are about to take some very deadly turns. Director Richard Franklin (PSYCHO II, LINK) packs plenty of Hitchcock-like twists and suspense into this sly shocker that was nominated for four Australian Film Institute Awards and remains one of the most surprising thrillers of the '80s.Stills from Road Games (Click for larger image)
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