Midnight Screenings: Ozploitation! 2010 / Roadgames / Australia 1981
Various games can shorten the long highway journey across the Australian desert. A truck driver in this tightly crafted Hitchcock thriller entertains himself by fleshing out the personal stories of the people in the cars around him. Isn’t that mysterious man in the green van by any chance the mass murderer they’re after?
An American living in Australia earns a wage driving a truck. The well-read and self-deprecating man shortens the long delivery route across the Australian desert with countless intellectual games, especially one based on commenting on the drivers he meets on the highway. In addition to a variety of comic figures, he also repeatedly passes a mysterious man in a green van. Various indications gradually lead the hero to the suspicion that the man is the mass murderer he heard about on the radio. He relates his theory to an American hitchhiker, who decides to help him find a clear-cut answer to questions shrouding the suspected killer. This tightly crafted thriller is a self-confessed "highway pastiche” of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). The story superbly builds suspense by blending ambiguous signs and false clues with the thoughts of a protagonist preyed on by paranoia and doubt.
100 min / Color, 35 mm
Director Richard Franklin
/ Screenplay Everett de Roche
/ Dir. of Photography Vincent Monton
/ Music Brian May
/ Editor Edward McQueen-Mason
/ Producer Richard Franklin, Barbi Taylor
/ Production Essaness Pictures, Quest
/ Cast Stacy Keach, Jamie Lee Curtis, Grant Page
Richard Franklin (1948, Melbourne-2007, Melbourne) moved to Hollywood after shooting Roadgames. His first project in the land of glitter was Psycho II (1983), which fell in line with his other Australian films that paid tribute to Alfred Hitchcock. Franklin’s other projects abroad include the American thriller Cloak & Dagger (1984), and the British horror film Link (1986) about a highly intelligent and murderous orangutan. Here he once again worked with Everett De Roche, the screenwriter of his Australian hits Patrick (1978) and Roadgames. After less-than- auspicious experiences with the Hollywood filmmaking system while shooting the action picture F/X2 (1991), Franklin returned to Australia where he directed the dramas Hotel Sorrento (1995) and Brilliant Lies (1996).
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