Truck Driver Movies: Road Games (1981)
Hey truck drivers! We’re back with another episode of our popular running series of Truck Driver Movies. Here we look back at Hollywood’s obsession with the lifestyle of the truck driver on film, whether they’re heroes, smugglers, singers or villains.
This time, we look at an underground gem from the Ozzploitation genre starring American film actors Stacey Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis, called Road Games.
First off, Road Games was supposed to star international tough guy Sean Connery. Guess what? Connery didn’t fit into the budget. We’re not sure how the producers went from Connery to weird tough guy Stacy Keach, but we’ll just leave it at that. Did they sacrifice the low budget for actors to retain 70s scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis? Who knows. She was quite the catch after her turn in the phenomenal Halloween, so perhaps they put all their eggs into one basket case to capitalize on her rising fame. Who could blame them? She was a favorite of horror maven John Carpenter, and that’s good enough for us. After all, her mommy was Janet Leigh, who turned in one of the most iconic scenes in all of horror, as Marion Crane in the shower scene of Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Keach plays Pat Quid, a truck driver who is traveling cross Australia. On the way he encounters various other travelers, and the occasional hitchhikers repeatedly as they’re traveling the same road. A favorite pastime of Pat is to play games to pass the time on the journey. Pamela is one hitchhiker he picks up. But when she disappears, he suspects that the driver of a van who has been acting a little strange, maybe the serial killer mentioned on the radio. But his pursuit of the van driver brings him to the attention of the police, who begin to suspect him.Then things go even crazier. You’ll have to watch and find out.
Road Games isn’t the best of the truck driver horror genre, but it’s a worthy entry. After all, we are talking about a genre that features kitschy classics like Duel and Maximum Overdrive. However, it’s still a film that is able to retain a sense of suspense and menace. So with that in mind, we’re featuring the 1st sequence of the Aussie trucker favorite, with links to the rest (which you can probably figure out on your own).
Enjoy, truck drivers!
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