Wikipedia

Roadgames

This article is about the 1981 Australian thriller film. For other uses, see Road Games (disambiguation).

Roadgames (stylised as Road Games) is a 1981 Australian thriller film directed by Richard Franklin and starring Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis. The film follows a truck driver travelling across Australia who, along with the help of a hitchhiker, seeks to track down a serial killer who is butchering women and dumping their dismembered bodies along desolate highways.

Roadgames
Theatrical release poster
Directed byRichard Franklin
Screenplay byEverett De Roche
Story by
  • Everett De Roche
  • Richard Franklin
Produced byRichard Franklin
Starring
CinematographyVincent Monton
Edited byEdward McQueen-Mason
Music byBrian May
Production
companies
Distributed by
Release dates
  • 26 June 1981 (1981-06-26) (Australia)
  • 19 November 1981 (1981-11-19) (US)
Running time
101 minutes
CountryAustralia
LanguageEnglish
BudgetA$1.75 million[1]
Box officeA$100,000

Plot

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In rural Australia, truck driver Patrick Quid pulls into a motel for the night. There, a man in a green van checks in with a female hitchhiker. Quid had passed the hitchhiker earlier because trucking company policy forbade him from picking her up. In the motel room, the hitchhiker strums a guitar while the man unpacks a new guitar string. The man winds the string around his gloved hands and uses it to garrote the woman.

Quid wakes the next morning in his truck. His pet dingo sniffs at the garbage outside the motel, and Quid notices the van driver watching from the room's window. Quid picks up pigs from Universal Meats, sets off for Perth and on the road passes a nagging wife and her family, a cautious man hauling a sailboat, and a station wagon crammed full of toy balls. He repeatedly passes by another female hitchhiker.

The wife, Frita, creates a roadblock by streaming pink paper across the highway. When Quid stops at the sight of it, she climbs into his cab and orders Quid to catch up with her husband who left her at the side of the road. They play 20 Questions to pass the time. Frita mentions a woman's murder and his nonchalant answers disturb her. She suspects that he might be the serial killer from the news.

Quid stops the truck after seeing the green van parked along the road. Its driver has trash bags and an esky; he appears to be burying the bags. When the van driver notices Quid watching him through binoculars, he abandons his work and drives away. Later, at a roadhouse, the van driver assaults Quid's dingo. Quid gives chase, but encounters the slow-driving boat owner, who refuses to let Quid pass. Eventually, Quid destroys the boat, but the van is too far off to catch.

Quid picks up the second female hitchhiker, Pamela Rushworth, that he has passed before. She is the daughter of a powerful American diplomat. Quid urges Pamela to let her father know that she is alright. At a service station, they notice the van parked near the restroom. Seeing that someone is in the toilet stall, Quid thinks that he has the killer cornered. Pamela investigates the van while Quid tries to get the man to exit the stall. While reaching for the esky inside the van, Pamela realizes that the driver is sleeping on the floor. In the restroom, a biker emerges from the stall. Quid rushes outside to see that the van is gone.

When Quid catches up to the van, it appears that Pamela is happily in the passenger seat. Later that night, Quid notices the van parked off the side of the road and pulls over to investigate. He hears people giggling in the bushes nearby and assumes that Pamela and the van driver are having sex. After breaking into the van to investigate, he finds that the esky only contains food.

Quid arrives at the outskirts of Perth and, while reporting to the weigh station, sees the van. He follows the van through the streets of Perth, trailed by the police. Eventually the van reaches a dead end and Quid's truck becomes stuck in the narrow alleys. The van driver approaches Quid's truck and attempts to strangle him with a garrotte, but Quid disarms him. When Quid starts to strangle the van driver with the garrotte, the police arrive and assume that Quid is the killer. Upon freeing a gagged and bound Pamela from the van, the police learn that Quid is innocent, and Pamela's actual captor is caught whilst trying to escape through the crowd.

After delivering the meat shipment, Quid relates to Pamela that after he had found his trailer door open and discovered the load weight some kilos over, he had presumed that the van driver had killed her and disposed of her inside his trailer. At the meat facility, a woman cleaning out the back of the trailer is brushed by a guitar string hanging from the ceiling. After she pulls it, a human head falls from above and lands in her soap bucket.

Cast

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Production

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Development

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While making the film Patrick Richard Franklin gave Everett De Roche a copy of Rear Window as an example of how he wanted the script typed. De Roche loved the content of the script and expressed his desire to write a film with a similar plot but set on a moving vehicle.[2] He developed the idea with Franklin in Fiji, where the latter was co-producing The Blue Lagoon (1980).[3] De Roche wrote the first draft of Roadgames over a period of 8 days in a hotel, with Franklin visiting periodically during breaks in the production of Blue Lagoon.[4]

De Roche had written an episode of the TV series Truckies (1978) called "Road Games". Its truckie characters became concerned about a strange man following two small children on a bus. It aired on 4 September 1978 and was directed by Michael Ludbrook.[5][6]

Filming

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Shot on location in the Nullarbor Plain and in Melbourne, the budget of $1.75 million was the highest ever for an Australian film at that time. Avco Embassy paid $500,000 for all rights outside Australia, and the balance came from the Greater Union, the Australian Film Commission, the Victorian Film Corporation, and the Western Australian Film Council.[7]

Casting

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Franklin wanted to cast Sean Connery in the lead, but was unable to afford his salary, and the role went to Stacy Keach instead.

Australian actress Lisa Peers was cast to play opposite him, but the US distributors insisted on an American co-star, so Franklin cast Jamie Lee Curtis.[8] The film ran into trouble with Actors Equity when the Melbourne branch of the union approved the importation of Curtis, but the Sydney branch opposed it. "We found ourselves as the ping-pong ball in a game of politics between Melbourne and Sydney, and it nearly resulted in the film closing down," said Franklin.[4] Franklin later acknowledged wishing he had increased the size of Curtis' part to take more advantage of her.[9]

Release

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Home media

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The film was first released on VHS in Australia by Star Video in the early 1980s. In the US, the first VHS release was handled by Embassy Home Entertainment and later in the 1990s by Nelson Entertainment. Roadgames was first released on DVD in the United States on 10 June 2003 by Anchor Bay Entertainment, this release has long gone out of print with copies running at $85 on Amazon.com.[10] In Australia, Umbrella Entertainment released a special edition DVD in 2004–this DVD is also no-longer in print. In April 2016, it was announced that Umbrella would release a new 4k restoration of the film for the first time on Blu-ray disc.[11] Scream Factory released it on Blu-ray in a special edition form on 12 November 2019. A 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray release was announced by Kino Lorber on 11 August 2024.

Reception

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Box office

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Roadgames was a box office bomb in Australia upon its June 1981 release. It was released theatrically in the United States in November 1981, and similarly did not perform as well as originally expected, which Franklin blamed on its marketing as a slasher film.[8] However, it did lead to Franklin landing the job of directing Psycho II in 1983.[9]

Critical response

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On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 92% based on 12 reviews, with an average rating of 7.90/10.[12] On Metacritic the film has a score of 71 out of 100, based on 6 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[13] Variety gave the film a positive review, calling it "an above-average suspenser."[14] The New York Times, however, gave the film a middling review, saying: "Although Road Games was made in Australia, the Outback might as well be the New Jersey Turnpike."[15] Time Out gave the film a positive review, saying: "It's precisely its pretensions which make this a surprisingly agreeable cross of angst-ridden '70s road movie with Hitchcockian thriller... Effective as a string of cinematic shocks, the movie manages a good number of coups, with its cargo of raw meat, use of Jamie Lee's association with endless knife-flicks, and the ever-so-slightly surreal placing of figures in a vast landscape, making for an endearing horror pic."[16] Leonard Maltin described it as an "adequate thriller" and rated the film 21⁄2-stars-out-of-4.[17]

Accolades

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Award Category Subject Result
AACTA Awards
(1981 AFI Awards) 		Best Supporting Actress Marion Edward Nominated
Best Cinematography Vincent Monton Nominated
Best Editing Edward McQueen-Mason Nominated
Best Original Music Score Brian May Nominated
Saturn Awards Best International Film Nominated
Best DVD Classic Film Release Nominated

Legacy

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The film has been cited by Quentin Tarantino as one of his favourite films, and also served as influence in Australian director Greg McLean's debut feature, Wolf Creek (2005).[18]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Stratton 1990, pp. 261–62.
  2. ^ "Interview with Richard Franklin", Signet, 15 September 1995 Archived 1 April 2013 at the Wayback Machine accessed 18 November 2012
  3. ^ Stratton 1990, p. 261.
  4. ^ a b Scott Murray, "Richard Franklin: Director/Producer", Senses of Cinema, 12 July 2008 accessed 26 October 2012
  5. ^ "TV Guide". The Age. 31 August 1978. p. 50.
  6. ^ "Thriller on the road". The Age. 31 August 1978. p. 35.
  7. ^ Stratton 1990, p. 262.
  8. ^ a b Kangaroo Hitchcock: The Making of Roadgames (2003). Anchor Bay Entertainment.
  9. ^ a b Interview with Richard Franklin, Mondo Stump, originally published in Eros Magazine Vol 3 No 1 (2003), Canberra accessed 15 October 2012
  10. ^ "Road Games". Amazon.com. 10 June 2003. Retrieved 9 April 2016.
  11. ^ ""Road Games" to receive 4k Blu-ray treatment from Umbrella Entertainment!". Fangoria. 8 April 2016. Retrieved 9 April 2016.
  12. ^ "Road Games". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 21 March 2023.
  13. ^ "Road Games (1981) Reviews". Metacritic.
  14. ^ Staff (31 December 1980). "Review: 'Road Games'". Variety. Retrieved 30 April 2016.
  15. ^ Mitgang, Herbert (8 February 1982). "KEACH IN AUSTRALIAN 'ROAD GAMES'". The New York Times. Retrieved 1 May 2016.
  16. ^ R.M. (10 September 2012). "Roadgames, directed by Richard Franklin". Time Out. London. Retrieved 1 May 2016.
  17. ^ Leonard Maltin (2013). Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide: 2014 Edition : the Modern Era. Plume Books. p. 478. ISBN 978-0-14-218055-6.
  18. ^ Curtis, Jamie Lee; Keach, Stacy; McLean, Greg; and Quentin Tarantino (2008). Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (Documentary). City Films Worldwide.

Bibliography

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  • Stratton, David (1990). The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry. Pan MacMillan. ISBN 978-0-73290-250-6.
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