TV REVIEWS : ‘Revenge’ Takes to the Highway

“Revenge on the Highway” (on NBC Sunday at 9 p.m., Channels 4, 36 and 39) is a hard-nosed road picture, full of diesel rigs, renegade truckers and a father determined to avenge the death of his son.

Stacy Keach plays the tormented big-rig driver whose teen-age son is killed on the father’s wedding day. Leaving his bride behind, he pilots miles of desert highway in pursuit of the hit-and-run killer.

(The story is based on the ordeal of California diesel driver Claude Sams, who died from cancer as the movie was being completed. His dogged search for the trucker who ran down his 19-year-old son Paul is accurate, but the movie’s action-filled ending is fictionalized.)

While the movie suffers from banal domestic scenes, three elements lift the production above the ordinary highway chase movie: (1) the glimpse at the world of trucker outlaws, big-rig drivers strung out on uppers who play deadly road games and terrorize motorists; (2) the feral performance of Sandahl Bergman as the meanest trucker on the road, and (3) director Craig Baxley’s menacing camera compositions on the highway locations outside Albuquerque.

The teleplay by Dennis Shryack and Michael Blodgett will nudge the memories of TV fans who once sat mesmerized by “Duel,” the tense, 1971 Steven Spielberg TV movie.