One Road Leads to Another

I'd been seeing a lot of bad movies recently and it was getting kind of depressing. Fortunately, I happened upon 1981's Road Games. That lifted my spirits right quick.

Stacey Keach plays an American truck driver working in Australia. He's a pretty weird character--we learn he's travelled around the world, has been in the military, but he also likes to read Chaucer and he's named his pet dingo Boswell after Samuel Johnson's famous biographer. Stacey Keach's performance makes it credible--few actors could've so perfectly sold this concept of the cultured tough guy.

Also well established is a world around Keach. He comments on the people he sees on the road and he sees many of them further along his route. He's transporting pork and we gather there's a meat shortage due to a strike. I wondered if some of the antagonism Keach meets with along the way was due to union members but that turns out to be a red herring (interestingly, the film's production was affected by actors' unions).

In some ways, Road Games is much like other trucker films of the '70s and '80s, featuring an earthy, charismatic main character and the assorted characters he meets along the way. But this is a trucker/murder mystery--it turns out there's a serial killer on the loose. Keach is already observing everything around him from habit, he naturally transitions into looking for clues.

Helping him out is Jamie Lee Curtis who plays a wealthy hitchhiker. In one of my favourite scenes, she gets kidnapped while Keach is pursuing the wrong trail. When he sees a van driving off with her inside, he immediately tries to steal a moped--only to lose control of it and crash into a rubbish pile. It almost looks like an outtake. If it was an honest mistake and the director decided to keep it, bravo. The embarrassing moment is followed by Keach having to fend off the owner of the moped and the gas station attendants while he gets back in his truck. It all feels very raw, natural, and captivating.

I feel like there probably was a lot of rewriting and improvisation in this movie and some things don't quite make sense by the end. But it's all anchored by Keach's character and the sheer wildness of the story. I loved every minute.

Road Games is available on Amazon Prime.