Entertainment
Perfect, Forgotten 80s Thriller Is Hitchcock Meets Mad Max
By Robert Scucci
| Published
Road thrillers always make for a great time because there is nothing more unnerving than barreling down the highway when you are either in danger yourself or trying to help somebody else who might be. 1981’s Road Games, an Australian thriller that plays like a strange middle ground between Mad Max and a Hitchcock-style serial killer story, has no shortage of tense moments. It shows just how badly the road can mess with your head after a long day’s work as a commercial trucker who just wants to grab a few hours of sleep between jobs. Perspectives grow hazy, lines begin to blur, and you are almost certain you have seen that green van and its driver doing something suspicious on multiple occasions, even if you cannot quite prove what they are up to.
A tense, white knuckle experience from start to finish, Road Games is a lean thriller built around an exceedingly simple plot. That simplicity should not lull you into a false sense of security, though, because not everything is what it seems, especially once the horizon darkens, the road goes quiet, and a radio news broadcast suggests you may be sharing the highway with somebody who is very, very dangerous.
A Road Best Left Untraveled
Road Games introduces us to trucker Patrick Quid (Stacy Keach) and his pet dingo, Boswell. Patrick makes a point of telling anyone who will listen that there is a difference between a man who drives a truck and a trucker, implying that he views his current line of work as something beneath him, even if it pays the bills for now. He travels alone with Boswell, often taking back-to-back jobs against his better judgment. There is nothing to suggest Patrick is unstable, but his dispatcher encourages him to push through sleep deprivation with caffeine pills so he can take on more work.
While sleeping in his truck outside a motel one night, Patrick notices a man driving a suspicious looking green van who checks in with a female hitchhiker. The next morning, Patrick sees the man leave alone after stopping at the dumpster and climbing into the van before heading back out onto the road.
Once he is driving again, Patrick encounters a recurring group of colorful characters. There is an elderly man hauling a boat, a face-masked motorcyclist who keeps popping up, a nagging woman named Frita (Marion Edward) and her visibly annoyed husband, and another woman standing roadside looking for a ride. Against his better judgment and company regulations, Patrick picks up Frita after her husband abandons her on the side of the road. During this stretch, he spots the green van again, this time catching its driver burying suspicious looking bags in the desert and carrying around a small cooler.
Frita becomes uneasy with Patrick’s calm attitude about the encounter, especially after hearing a radio report about a possible serial killer operating in the area. She eventually parts ways with him, but not before Patrick picks up the hitchhiker he passed earlier, known only as Hitch (Jamie Lee Curtis). The two hit it off almost immediately, and Hitch reveals herself to be Pamela Rushworth, the heiress of a wealthy US diplomat who wanted to go on an adventure of her own, suggesting that she may have been reported missing from her high-profile life. As Patrick continues his route with Pamela, the green van keeps resurfacing, prompting them to investigate its driver under the assumption that he is the killer mentioned in the news.
A Series Of Escalating Events
As sleep deprivation takes hold, Pat and Pamela get separated, and Pat finds himself unsure of who he can trust. Everywhere he turns, the green van seems to be there. He starts pushing his truck at reckless RPMs to make his delivery on time, becoming increasingly unhinged along the way. Pat is convinced he needs to track down the green van to stop anyone else from getting hurt, but things spiral further when Frita reports him to the authorities. She suggests that Pat himself might be the killer, and that the story about the green van is nothing more than a distraction.
As Pat unravels while searching for Pamela and the van, all while evading police and trying to finish his route, his sanity is put into question. Every possible pressure point is hit, and Pat is fully aware that he is starting to lose his grip. With law enforcement closing in, his hitchhiker companion missing, and the green van’s driver still at large, Pat is forced to pull himself together and see his increasingly bizarre job through before the road swallows him whole.
Road Games toys with the familiar tropes you see in films like the grossly underrated Black Dog. Hallucinations feel inevitable, and the job itself takes a back seat to the strange, inexplicable encounters that keep piling up. Stacy Keach’s straight faced performance as an expatriate American trucker tearing through the Australian outback with a pet dingo is half the fun. His deadpan presence grounds the film even as everything around him starts to feel unreliable.
If you want to find out whether Pat finally snaps or if the world around him is the real problem in Road Games, you can fire it up on Tubi, where it is currently streaming for free.