Roadgames (stylised as Road Games) is a 1981 Australian thriller film directed by Richard Franklin and starring Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis.

The film follows a truck driver travelling across Australia who, along with the help of a hitchhiker, seeks to track down a serial killer who is butchering women and dumping their dismembered bodies along desolate highways.

His pet dingo sniffs at the garbage outside the motel, and Quid notices the van driver watching from the room's window.

Quid picks up pigs from Universal Meats, sets off for Perth and on the road passes a nagging wife and her family, a cautious man hauling a sailboat, and a station wagon crammed full of toy balls.

At the meat facility, a woman cleaning out the back of the trailer is brushed by a guitar string hanging from the ceiling.

While making the film Patrick Richard Franklin gave Everett De Roche a copy of Rear Window as an example of how he wanted the script typed.

De Roche loved the content of the script and expressed his desire to write a film with a similar plot but set on a moving vehicle.

[4] De Roche had written an episode of the TV series Truckies (1978) called "Road Games".

[5][6] Shot on location in the Nullarbor Plain and in Melbourne, the budget of $1.75 million was the highest ever for an Australian film at that time.

[7] Franklin wanted to cast Sean Connery in the lead, but was unable to afford his salary, and the role went to Stacy Keach instead.

"We found ourselves as the ping-pong ball in a game of politics between Melbourne and Sydney, and it nearly resulted in the film closing down," said Franklin.

It was released theatrically in the United States in November 1981, and similarly did not perform as well as originally expected, which Franklin blamed on its marketing as a slasher film.

"[14] The New York Times, however, gave the film a middling review, saying: "Although Road Games was made in Australia, the Outback might as well be the New Jersey Turnpike.

"[15] Time Out gave the film a positive review, saying: "It's precisely its pretensions which make this a surprisingly agreeable cross of angst-ridden '70s road movie with Hitchcockian thriller...

Effective as a string of cinematic shocks, the movie manages a good number of coups, with its cargo of raw meat, use of Jamie Lee's association with endless knife-flicks, and the ever-so-slightly surreal placing of figures in a vast landscape, making for an endearing horror pic.