Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ozzywood Classic, 14 Feb 2006
Stacy Keach takes the lead as an american working, with his dingo on the big rigs in Australia, the plot revolves around Keach's encounters with a van driver following the same route across the outback. Throw in several murders of pretty female hitchhikers and it slowly becomes obvious to you and Keech that this van driver is the culprit. Jamie Lee Curtis joins Keach on his adventure as a runaway heiress Hitchhiker and is as charming as ever.
Keach has always been a fine actor, better than people give him credit for and with the help of an excellent script he makes a believable lead, theres no point in the film that any of the actors do or say anything that a real person wouldn't do or say in that self same situation. All in all this is a lovely little Ozzy film, full of the kind of little touches that can make an average film into an excellent film, even the moments with just Keach driving through the deserts of Australia that could be just blank moments he keeps the interest up with his constant dialog with his pet Dingo.
Give road games a chance, you won't regret it.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
A suspenseful souffle cooked up by Richard Franklin, Stacy Keach and a serial killer with a taste for butchering, 20 Sep 2008
"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 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 soufflé.
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.
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