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RoadgamesLike the travel games gentleman trucker Quid (Keach) plays to pass the time as he criss-crosses the continent, there??™s some pleasing, six-degrees-of-separation-style fun to be had with this gripping curio.
In the years between Halloween and A Fish Called Wanda, Jamie Lee Curtis made a series of way-above-par exploitationers, including this, The Fog and Terror Train. Behind the camera, Richard Franklin graduated from wannabe to stand-in with the nifty Psycho II, and composer Brian May worked on Mad Max 2 with stuntman/baddie Grant Page. Viewed in this light, the chances of all four coming together for an Antipodean-set, Hitchcockian trucker flick were bewilderingly high.
Luckily for collectors of film ephemera, it's an elegance matched by De Roche's fluent, superbly constructed script. More a pitch than a plot (think Duel Down Under), it casts Quid against an enigmatic and perhaps murderous van driver while radio reports of severed limbs and missing girls are half-heard in the background.
As Quid boredly makes up backstories for the people he passes, it's impossible to ascertain whether he's glibly imagining mysteries where there are none, completely gaga or in genuine danger - and there's wittily insinuating evidence for all of these conclusions.
All credit to Franklin and Co, but Roadgames has a certain director's pudgy fingerprints smeared all over it. Curtis's runaway is nicknamed "Hitch" by a clearly smitten Quid, and the master's owly, jowly face fills the front page of a magazine. In fact, his legacy is equally evident in the snap and crackle of the pair's inter-generational flirting. It's there in the forward zoom/reverse track shot of an encroaching heat haze, irresistibly recalling Vertigo 's signature flourish. And it's certainly there in an eloquent shot linking the murderer's gloved hand, a crimson-coloured brick wall and Quid's pet dingo pawing anxiously at bin bags that may, or may not, contain body parts.
Add in red herrings aplenty, excellent stunts, and a series of menacing, possibly conspiratorial, locals - not to mention a shock ending that would make Carrie cack her pants - and you have the makings of a minor classic. The maestro himself would surely approve.
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