By Robert Scucci
| Published 48 seconds ago

Road thrillers always make for a great time because there is nothing more unnerving than barreling down the highway when you are either in danger yourself or trying to help somebody else who might be. 1981’s Road Games, an Australian thriller that plays like a strange middle ground between Mad Max and a Hitchcock-style serial killer story, has no shortage of tense moments. It shows just how badly the road can mess with your head after a long day’s work as a commercial trucker who just wants to grab a few hours of sleep between jobs. Perspectives grow hazy, lines begin to blur, and you are almost certain you have seen that green van and its driver doing something suspicious on multiple occasions, even if you cannot quite prove what they are up to.

A tense, white knuckle experience from start to finish, Road Games is a lean thriller built around an exceedingly simple plot. That simplicity should not lull you into a false sense of security, though, because not everything is what it seems, especially once the horizon darkens, the road goes quiet, and a radio news broadcast suggests you may be sharing the highway with somebody who is very, very dangerous.

A Road Best Left Untraveled

Road Games introduces us to trucker Patrick Quid (Stacy Keach) and his pet dingo, Boswell. Patrick makes a point of telling anyone who will listen that there is a difference between a man who drives a truck and a trucker, implying that he views his current line of work as something beneath him, even if it pays the bills for now. He travels alone with Boswell, often taking back-to-back jobs against his better judgment. There is nothing to suggest Patrick is unstable, but his dispatcher encourages him to push through sleep deprivation with caffeine pills so he can take on more work.

While sleeping in his truck outside a motel one night, Patrick notices a man driving a suspicious looking green van who checks in with a female hitchhiker. The next morning, Patrick sees the man leave alone after stopping at the dumpster and climbing into the van before heading back out onto the road.

Once he is driving again, Patrick encounters a recurring group of colorful characters. There is an elderly man hauling a boat, a face-masked motorcyclist who keeps popping up, a nagging woman named Frita (Marion Edward) and her visibly annoyed husband, and another woman standing roadside looking for a ride. Against his better judgment and company regulations, Patrick picks up Frita after her husband abandons her on the side of the road. During this stretch, he spots the green van again, this time catching its driver burying suspicious looking bags in the desert and carrying around a small cooler.

Frita becomes uneasy with Patrick’s calm attitude about the encounter, especially after hearing a radio report about a possible serial killer operating in the area. She eventually parts ways with him, but not before Patrick picks up the hitchhiker he passed earlier, known only as Hitch (Jamie Lee Curtis). The two hit it off almost immediately, and Hitch reveals herself to be Pamela Rushworth, the heiress of a wealthy US diplomat who wanted to go on an adventure of her own, suggesting that she may have been reported missing from her high-profile life. As Patrick continues his route with Pamela, the green van keeps resurfacing, prompting them to investigate its driver under the assumption that he is the killer mentioned in the news.

A Series Of Escalating Events

As sleep deprivation takes hold, Pat and Pamela get separated, and Pat finds himself unsure of who he can trust. Everywhere he turns, the green van seems to be there. He starts pushing his truck at reckless RPMs to make his delivery on time, becoming increasingly unhinged along the way. Pat is convinced he needs to track down the green van to stop anyone else from getting hurt, but things spiral further when Frita reports him to the authorities. She suggests that Pat himself might be the killer, and that the story about the green van is nothing more than a distraction.

As Pat unravels while searching for Pamela and the van, all while evading police and trying to finish his route, his sanity is put into question. Every possible pressure point is hit, and Pat is fully aware that he is starting to lose his grip. With law enforcement closing in, his hitchhiker companion missing, and the green van’s driver still at large, Pat is forced to pull himself together and see his increasingly bizarre job through before the road swallows him whole.

Road Games toys with the familiar tropes you see in films like the grossly underrated Black Dog. Hallucinations feel inevitable, and the job itself takes a back seat to the strange, inexplicable encounters that keep piling up. Stacy Keach’s straight faced performance as an expatriate American trucker tearing through the Australian outback with a pet dingo is half the fun. His deadpan presence grounds the film even as everything around him starts to feel unreliable.

If you want to find out whether Pat finally snaps or if the world around him is the real problem in Road Games, you can fire it up on Tubi, where it is currently streaming for free.

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 35 seconds ago

Steven Spielberg invented the Summer blockbuster with Jaws, and then did it again with E.T. and Jurassic Park, but in terms of sheer spectacle, Roland Emmerich invented the visual language used by today’s Summer blockbusters with 1996’s Independence Day. The shot of a massive alien ship hovering over the White House and then blowing it to smithereens was everywhere that year, from the Super Bowl to every primetime TV ad break.

Story became secondary, special effects on the biggest screens possible took over as the real reason to go to the theaters, and Hollywood was never the same. Now you can relive the experience on Netflix.

Welcome To Earth

Independence Day wastes no time starting off the massive alien motherships moving into position above the world’s largest cities. In the most realistic moment of the entire film, there’s a group of people who decide to gather directly under the ships to welcome the aliens. That’s when they open up and unleash a devastating blast that destroys Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. It’s hard to understand today what it was like to see this level of devastation on a scale never seen before, with this budget and looking this good. 

The other half of Independence Day, the plot, is supported by an all-time great cast, including Jeff Goldblum, Vivica A. Fox, Judd Hirsch, Mary McDonnell, Randy Quaid, Mae Whitman, Brent Spiner, Bill Pullman as one of the greatest fictional Presidents ever, and the breakthrough role of a sitcom star: Will Smith. No one cares that the plot is as thin as Flat Stanley. From top to bottom, every member of the cast understood the assignment. This is one of the most fun movies ever. 

You can pinpoint the exact moment when Will Smith became a movie star. After Captain Steven Hiller is shot down, he walks right over to the alien fighter he took with him, pops open the hatch, and drops a one-liner, “Welcome to Earth,” as he punches the alien in the face. He was no longer The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; he was King of the Summer Blockbuster. 

Independence Day Reshaped Movies Forever

According to Rotten Tomatoes, Independence Day has a critic rating of 69 percent and an audience rating of 75 percent, both of which seem irrelevant. Roland Emmerich’s follow-up to Stargate is a pure popcorn movie. For every bit of horrible dialogue, there’s Bill Pullman’s triumphant speech. For every contrived plot device, there’s an extended dogfight between alien saucers and F/A-18 Hornets. This is the ultimate “turn off your brain” and enjoy movie. 

At the time of its release, Independence Day became the second-highest-grossing film of all time with $817 million, making Jeff Goldblum, star of Jurassic Park, the then-highest-grossing film star of all time and one of the most successful box-office stars of the 90s. Decades later, every superhero movie, every Summer blockbuster, can trace its visual style back to Emmerich’s groundbreaking disaster film. 

For years, fans wanted more. Finally, in 2016, the sequel, Independence Day: Resurgence, which brought back Pullman, Goldblum, and Hirsch, hit theaters with Liam Hemsworth as the new hotshot pilot. After 20 years, no one cared. 

Don’t let the forgettable and pointless sequel deter you from going back and streaming Independence Day now that it’s on Netflix.  Some movies are hits, some become cult classics, and then there’s Independence Day, which managed to transcend Hollywood and reshape the world of entertainment in its image. Whether it’s the hundredth time or the first time, you will get hyped when Will Smith punches the alien, Bill Pullman announces today is our Independence Day, and when Randy Quaid gets his revenge. Just don’t think about it too hard. It’s not that type of movie.

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 1 hour ago

Outside of the Klingons, the most legendary foe in Star Trek is arguably the Borg, whose nearly-unstoppable cybernetic warriors have come close to wiping out the Federation on a number of occasions. While these baddies were thought to be defeated in the series finale of Voyager, they popped up yet again to torment the titular hero of Picard across multiple seasons. However, what most fans don’t realize is that we would have possibly never heard from the Borg after The Next Generation if not for the late, great executive producer, Michael Piller.

Piller is, in a very real way, the man who saved TNG: he became showrunner in Season 3, ushering in an era of better uniforms, bigger sets, and infinitely improved writing. In Season 6, the writer of the two-part, Borg-centric episode “Descent” was unsure how to broach the fact that the Enterprise crew returned a freed Borg (Hugh) back to the Collective. This could theoretically change their entire race, and while “Descent” dealt with Borg who had been infected with individuality, the episode never specified just how many Borg were affected by Hugh’s return.

My Borg Friend’s Back (And There’s Gonna Be Trouble)

That was actually Michael Piller’s suggestion, and he thought the episode would be stronger if it left that matter as an open question for the fans. Understandably, these episodes led to intense online speculation and more than a few Star Trek convention arguments about whether the Borg were now completely different. Previously, they had been like robot zombies driven by the monolithic will of their Collective; however, the Borg in “Descent,” after reabsorbing Hugh (a Borg who developed an identity of his own), were basically just a bunch of independent-minded thugs being bossed around by Data’s evil brother.

While Star Trek fans generally liked “Descent,” the fandom was almost collective in its dislike of the new Borg. Having them team up with another villain made for some good temporary drama, and it led to a really great episode for Brent Spiner’s Data. But as villains, the Borg had arguably lost everything that made them cool or unique in the first place.

Resistance Was Futile

That’s why it was such a relief when these villains showed up as their old selves in Star Trek: First Contact. Sure, some things were new (mostly, the fact that they now had a creepy Queen), but these guys were mostly back to being the shambling, unstoppable robot zombies that terrified fans in the first place. This movie served as a kind of creative reset for these villains, and most future appearances of the Borg (from their many appearances in Voyager to their final appearance in Picard) focused on them as a Collective rather than a group of individuals.

None of that would have been possible, however, without Michael Piller. He was the one who suggested that “Descent” writer Ronald D. Moore should never specify how many Borg had transformed into individuals once Hugh’s freed personality had been absorbed into the Collective. At the time, many fans hoped that it would just be a small segment of the Borg that were affected, and the rest of the Collective had remained unchanged; those hopes were paid off in First Contact, a movie whose plot would have been impossible if Piller hadn’t saved the Borg from becoming generic villains.

Creatively speaking, this was both a blessing and a curse; the Borg eventually became wildly oversaturated in the franchise, with every new appearance making them feel a bit less special. Nonetheless, though, they remain the most legendary foes from the Golden Age of Star Trek, and they would have faded into obscurity if not for the intervention of Michael Piller. In this way, the man who saved Picard’s first show also saved the foes who would make the captain’s life a living hell for decades to come.