Theres a killer on the road, his brain is squirming like a toad... but it aint meat truck delivery driver Stacy Keach. Or at least we dont think it is, due to the Hitchcockian manipulations of director Richard Franklin. Franklin had debuted with Oz horror cult-movie PATRICK, while ROAD GAMES would sell him to Hollywood as helmsman of a full foray into Hitchcock territory: PSYCHO 2 (1982), which did the previously unthinkable and turned an untouchable black-and-white classic into a short franchise. The actors, Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis, are fantastic, notes Oz-phile Slater of the films lead. Richard Franklins got a very good visual eye; I enjoy the games they play with each other and the sexual chemistry. But really, youre just watching a guy in a truck. Well, maybe just slightly more than that. Though the film sometimes plays like an Antipodean variation on US road movies like EASY RIDER or FIVE EASY PIECES Keachs character, Quid, picks up eccentrics who have little to do with the plot rather than any kind of horror movie, its driven by our knowledge that a sex murder has occurred. One of Quids fellow truck drivers, at first unseen, picks up a young woman at a truck stop who he strangles as she plays the guitar naked in a motel room. The dramatic tension for the rest of the film is fuelled by the interplay between Quid and his own pickup, Pamela (Curtis), an American tourist from a prominent family. Will she fall victim to the killer? Or will Quid unjustly take the rap for the other drivers crimes? The US stars of what is essentially an Australian road movie were there at the behest of the producers, one of whom, Bernard Schwarz (real name of Hollywood star Tony Curtis), had signed up to the film as a vehicle for his daughter Jamie Lee, then not long out of HALLOWEEN and HALLOWEEN II. They pick up a guy in the outback and theres a very lacklustre car chase in a town, describes an underwhelmed Slater, and thats it. It ends. Ive expended all this time to watch this very flawed finale. In fact the absolute endnote is the discovery of human body parts in Quids frozen meat trailer given that we already know the other driver is a sex murderer, was the Keach character targeted for a frame-up or is there more than one killer on the road? But our Oz correspondent sees the late Franklin who died in 2007, after failing to achieve his potential in Hollywood and returning to Australian cinema as overrated: The same with PATRICK: its not a very good film but its beloved to Australia. This guy is comatose, virtually a vegetable, and everyone raves at the ending when he jumps out of the bed brilliant, fantastic, bravo! Theyre doing a remake and I just dont get it.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
