Road Games (1981) – Review

The 1980s were literally exploding with slasher films — with the likes of Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger quickly becoming horror icons — so it’s not surprising that other countries would try and cash in on the genre, which did lead to such gems as Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. But down under in Australia, during the Ozploitation explosion, there was a staggering amount of cheap knock-offs and retreads of various genres, with horror being one of the more exploitative of the group, which brings us to the film we will be looking at today: Richard Franklin’s Road Games.

Road Games follows the cat-and-mouse shenanigans between truck driver Patrick Quid (Stacy Keach), who is always quick to point out to anyone that, “Just because I drive a truck does not make me a truck driver,” and a serial killer (Grant Page) who is butchering women and dumping their dismembered bodies along desolate highways. What makes Road Games stand out from many of its contemporaries is that our protagonist here is a man, and not the standard “final girl” — eventually, he picks up a runaway heiress (Jamie Lee Curtis), but her inclusion in this film works more as an extended cameo that looked to be simply cashing in on Curtis’s horror cred — with Stacey Keach being center stage and on screen for most of the film’s hour and forty minute run-time, making Road Games more in keeping with Steven Spielberg’s Duel, rather than any of the teen slashers that were populating local theaters at the time.

Stacey Keach, when you can’t afford Sean Connery.

The basic plot of Road Games revolves around a serial killer who has been picking up random female hitchhikers, butchering them and then leaving their body parts in various places across the Australian Outback. It’s while he is disposing of his latest victim, a young woman who apparently liked to play the guitar in the nude, that he catches the eye of Patrick Quid, whose rig was parked outside the motel that our killer was using as his current scene of the crime. Quid wonders why a man, who he had seen enter the motel with an attractive woman the previous night, was now so interested in the garbage bags sitting outside at the curb, bags that Quid’s lovable dingo also finds of interest. Later on, Quid learns of a series of grisly murders and the current hunt for another missing woman, which leads him to start to ponder the idea that the man he saw the night before could be the killer everyone is looking for. Later, spotting the man trying to bury more trash bags in the middle of nowhere, his suspicion increases.

He’s not watching Raymond Burr, and that is certainly not Grace Kelly behind him.

Eventually, Quid picks up hitchhiker Pamela Rushworth — played by Jamie Lee Curtis — who he’d passed by before but now picks up so that she can become his partner in sleuthing … briefly. He fills her in on his theories of the “Man in the Green Van” while also admitting that this could all be part of his active imagination, which is what keeps him sane on these long hauls. And after a heated discussion on the nature of the killer, such as his motives and an apparent dislike of women, they come across the mysterious green van parked by a gas station. Unfortunately, while Quid is busy confronting an innocent man in the nearby restroom Pamela investigates the van on her own, only to discover that the killer is still inside.

These two would never pass the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys test.

Once realizing he’s cornered the wrong man, Quid rushes outside to discover that the green van is now gone, but after a quick pursuit, he comes to the strange conclusion that Pamela was a willing passenger, so he breaks off the chase. This is what makes Patrick Quid such an interesting character, as well as a terrible terrible hero, for though Quid constantly quotes the likes of Emily Brontë and Robert Frost, while listening to classical music and books on tape — often accompanying them with his harmonica — he doesn’t come across as all that bright, and when it comes to solving a mystery, he veers between being obsessed with the killer to being apathetically uninterested him, all within a matter of moments.

And just how obtuse is Quid?

• He assumes that Pamela has ditched him for the green van dude with no real evidence to support this; this is especially weird when you consider that Pamela was onboard with the whole “This guy is a serial killer” theory.
• Later that night, he hears a couple having sex in the woods and assumes that Pamela and the van driver are fooling around. Turns out to be honeymooners.
• He suspects that a human carcass has been added to his cargo of hanging sides of pork, but he just brushes that idea off, despite the evidence to support it.
• The guy at the truck weigh station says that his load is several kilos over what is in the paperwork, but this still doesn’t seem to pique Quid’s interest.

“If I keep thinking happy thoughts everything will be okay.”

Quid does finally confront the killer, after what could possibly be the slowest car chase in cinema history, and Pamela is then discovered gagged and bound in the van — this after the cops, who were part of this insanely slow chase, try to arrest Quid for attacking the serial killer — and everyone gets a happy ending. Well as happy as one could expect when it’s revealed that the meat he suspected of being human was, in fact, human meat. This was discovered as one of the victims’ severed heads falls on a poor woman cleaning the trailer after the meat had been unloaded. This means Quid never voiced his suspicions to the police about the possible additional human cargo, and now a lot of people in Perth are going to be tasting long pig for the very first time.

Maybe they could send some of that meat to Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop.

Road Games owes much to the Hitchcockian thriller, especially when the film throws in the whole “Wrong Man” element into the mix, with the cops suspecting Quid of being the serial killer, but it also has the authorities being about as effective as your typical cops found in most slasher films (as in not at all), and this all adds up to making Road Games a rather fun psychological thriller, with a dash of slasher camp.

Now, Road Games is certainly not without its problems; the pacing is a bit slow even for a film of this type, the villain is rather forgettable, the cinematography isn’t all that impressive or inspired — certainly not on par with other Aussie films like Russell Mulcahy’s Razorback — and a few years later, Rutger Hauer would star in The Hitcher, which would take this premise into much darker and frightening territories. But Stacey Keach’s wildly eccentric truck driver is able to elevate Road Games beyond its station, and though this movie is far from being a genre classic, it does have enough on hand to make it a film I can recommend to fans of the genre.

I do like the cool German poster for the film.