DVD Review: Road Games (1981)

The Hitchcockian thriller Road Games won Australian filmmaker Richard Franklin (a lifelong Hitch devotee) his chance to direct, the surprisingly good, Psycho II (1983).  Hitchcock's influence is apparent right from the opening scene: a sinister motel, a naked girl and a psycho-killer who murders her and dismembers her body off screen.  His shadowy activities arouse the suspicion of American truck driver, Quid (Stacy Keach), whose phone calls to the police are ignored.  Quid soon finds himself being tailed by the killer in his grimy van.  He picks up gutsy runaway Hitch (Jamie Lee Curtis) and they play guessing games with the psycho's modus operandi, culminating in a taut scene where Quid confronts what he thinks is the killer in a toilet cubicle while Hitch investigates his van.  When Quid returns, Hitch and the van have disappeared, leaving him the police's prime suspect. 

Franklin provides some nicely tense moments and a handful of shocks, but one hesitates to call this an unsung classic.  The story (co-devised by Franklin and screenwriter Everett De Roche) meanders with characters talking an awful lot, but revealing very little, as the tension dissipates.  Keach makes for an affable, articulate hero ("Just because I drive a truck doesn't make me a truck driver") - though Quid remains something of an enigma.  Jamie Lee Curtis is strong throughout her few, brief scenes, but Hitch's back-story (the runaway daughter of an American diplomat) is too slight to be anything more than a plot wrinkle. 

Franklin (who succumbed to cancer in 2007) carves an effectively hostile environment amidst the Australian landscape, with dingy bars, grouchy locals and eccentric oddballs on the road.  He shows a flair for subtly unsettling images, teasing with glimpses of the killer in silhouette or revealed in a flash of lightning, and memorably illustrates Quid's growing paranoia via headlights reflected in his eyes.  The film often feels like the dark side of late seventies/early eighties cinema's obsession with truckers (ie. Convoy (1978), the Smokey and the Bandit films, etc.).  Franklin orchestrates some grinding automobile mayhem (that made Road Games  Australia's most expensive movie at the time) for the finale.  He tacks on an ineffective Carrie -style final shock, trying to compensate for the lacklustre payoff with the killer smiling mutely like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar.