Road Games: Ozploitation Volume One
November 17th 2008 22:08
"Road Games" is a slasher film, taking the suspense out of the dark city and out into the Australian desert as a truck driver, Quid, played by American actor Stacey Keach, finds reasons to suspect a fellow motorist of being a wanted serial killer.
Generally, I would expect exploitation films to be low budget and poor quality, but "Road Games" is actually a fine piece of work; according to IMDb, the budget of 1.8 million dollars, back in 1981, was the most expensive Australian production at that time.
In addition to Keach, director Richard Franklin got Jamie Lee Curtis to come down under to star as the female lead - it's a strange, incongruous image, two Americans driving a big rig across the Nullarbor Plain, chasing a dirty green van.
"Road Games" pays tribute to Hitchcock's "Rear Window", building tension by slowly adding clues to the mystery, giving the audience only scattered images to build a case. Quid begins to doubt himself as he crosses the country, as everyone around him thinks he's deranged for following the van.
The quality of the film is heightened by using Curtis and Keach, who seem to control the screen with minimal effort. Curtis is young here, barely an adult, but, even from then, she could hold the camera's attention with a quick grin and giggle. As a matter of course, however, it's always Curtis that ends up catching the attention of the man in the green van - we'd expect nothing else.
Naturally, the film stumbles on a few flaws - there's a few conversations that seem irrelevant to the film, and occasionally, scenes don't seem to make much sense, but these are easily overlooked for what the film is: a slasher film in the great Australian desert. Where the horizon extends, barren and bereft of life, as far as you can see - there's nowhere to hide, except in darkness.
Though it comes packaged in the Ozploitation boxset, "Road Games" is actually a terrific feature, masterfully building tension and complementing the story with a strange cast of secondary characters, all who add Aussie colour to this twist on the "Rear Window" scenario.
I say: Highly enjoyable and worth watching again. The Ozploitation boxset is definitely worth it!
See it for: There aren't that many Aussie characters in the film, but they're all outback country boys, grim and not pleased with a Yank coming into their pub.
*this image is from Cinedelica
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