Four young friends on a camping adventure across the Australian outback are run off the highway by a “road train”, a massive diesel truck hauling two large trailers. With their vehicle wrecked and Craig (Bob Morley) grievously injured, Marcus (Xavier Samuel) and his gutsy girlfriend Liz (Georgina Haig) discover the cabin inside the monstrous truck is empty. Shots ring out across the desert as a gun-toting psychopath (Aussie genre veteran David Argue) comes running towards them. Presuming the driver shot his passengers, the four companions flee aboard the truck hoping to reach the nearest town. However, the truck has plans of its own, stranding them in the middle of nowhere and, as frantic Nina (Sophie Lowe) discovers, exerting a strange influence on boyfriend Craig and her other friends. When Nina peeks inside the trailers what she discovers proves more terrifying than any of them could imagine.
As Quentin Tarantino sagely observed in the marvellous “Ozploitation” documentary Not Quite Hollywood (2009), automobile mayhem is the defining characteristic that binds almost every subgenre in Aussie exploitation, from post-apocalyptic actioner (The Road Warrior (1981)) to psychological thriller (Road Games (1981)) with literally dozens more in-between. In the case of Road Train, in spite of some visceral and skilfully staged road rampage, the tone veers away from the breakneck suspense of Duel (1971) to weave an ill-defined supernatural tale. Like The Car (1977), this truck of terror appears to be demonically possessed, tricked out with a hellish red interior, a CD player that assaults passengers with eardrum-rupturing rock, a three-headed hellhound motif and, most importantly, one seriously unpleasant alternative energy source.
The truck exerts a malefic influence upon its passengers. Initially affable Craig emerges from its rear trailer as some sort of feral prankster demon. Marcus returns from his fight with Argue’s Eastern-European accented driver wearing the man’s clothes, waving his gun and drooling like a maniac. The truck accentuates the deterioration of Marcus and Liz’s relationship, which has been strained ever since she admitted sleeping with Craig. The film opens with an explicit sex scene that adroitly underlines the tenderness between Craig and Nina, while next door Marcus and Liz lie bored in bed. Screenwriter Clive Hopkins include one welcome touch in that it is the frailest, most seemingly clueless character (much mocked for bringing along a book entitled: “101 Things You Need to Know About the Outback”) who finally shows the most grit and resourcefulness. But watching petulant characters constantly bicker and snipe at each other does not endear them to the audience. Nevertheless at worst they are annoying and hardly deserve being condemned to hell. There is no ideological reasoning behind this supernatural turn of events.
Dean Francis - formerly an actor on long-running soap opera Neighbours - makes effectively unsettling use of the ever-eerie South Australian landscape, juxtaposing sexual intimacy against the harsh wilderness in a manner that recalls Walkabout (1970) and Long Weekend (1977), albeit with less clearly delineated intent. The film is certainly not short of ideas, but strings them together in barely coherent fashion to emerge something of a confused, disjointed affair.
