Wonderful Movie

Redundant and unnecessary.

It is a performances centric movie

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

This quite some odd ball movie. The early scenes with Stacy Keach driving his lorry across the Australian wasteland are fine as he amusingly talks to himself or his dog. The opening killing is suitably stylish and strong but things begin to fade. Even the appearance of Jamie Lee Curtis cannot really save this from becoming just a little tedious. She seems rather awkward in the role and Keach try though he does, is clearly going to have difficulty carrying the bulk of this film by himself. We meet crazy Ausies every now and again (naturally!) and there are constant glimpses of the possible killer but it begins to occur to us that this is all there is and the last 20 minutes or so where the film descends into farce, leave the viewer very cold indeed.

His name is Quid. Patrick Anthony Quid. As in, British Sterling. He's an Aussie truckie, who whiles away long hours on the road by quoting poetry, talking to Boswell, and obsessively people-watching, which leads to the trail of a Jack The Ripper-like killer carving his way across the Nullarbor Plain. For such a verbose screenplay, Keach's sometimes lengthy monologues are quite witty and serve to move the plot forward without being overly self explanatory, while the addition of hitchhiker Sunny Day does also. JLC (basically in an extended cameo) turns up midway as Quid's next hitchhiker and potential target for Mr. Smith Or Jones.Film's plot is secondary to the characters, the majority of the screenplay is really an excuse for Keach to have fun with his philosophical, overly poetic character, and interact with JLC's likeminded character about the killer and his motives, while the actual killer is basically just a background player, only in a few minutes of the film, and his character has no lines of dialogue. Well photographed, largely in the confines of the truck's cab, and in the Australian Outback, with a dynamite 360-degree shot in a roadhouse bar; it, among other elements, give this the atmosphere and the feeling of a latter day noir/ Hitchcock film.

An Autrailian trucker movie. A trucker deals with life on the road in a Hitchcockian sorta way.This is an interesting look at truckin Down Under. Its a tad bit slow. The face falling from the ceiling of the trailer at the end of the movie didn't make any sense. But this movie wasn't a total waste of time. From the commentary, it sounds like the director needed more time and money to do some more work on the ending.Stacey Keech dives the Mercedes - Benz big rig.Stacey Keech is a permanent A list actor.Janie Lee Curtis is hot!!erldwgstruckermovies.com

"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 'soufflé.' He called North by Northwest a soufflé. 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 likable 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 soufflé.