Some movies, not unlike some people, are just born mean. They busy themselves by being as cruel and unsettling as they can be and refuse to give even the slightest shit about the distress and discomfort they leave in their wake, resulting in anyone who has crossed paths with them, feeling violated and unsure of the world around them. However, unlike people, when a movie manages to pull this trick off, the result can be an energizing, almost transformative experience that never leaves you and this brings neatly to the 1986 nerve shredder, The Hitcher.
Surely, anyone responding to Robert Harmon’s jangly thriller as it stuck out a laconic thumb, hoping to be picked up, must have emerged on the other side as shaken as I was thanks primarily to the sight of Rutger Hauer’s John Ryder trench coat wearing lunatic as he coldly orchestrates a merciless campaign of fear upon a young C. Thomas Howell. However, it’s the acts he perpetrates on people in order to achieve his unfathomable goal is what really lingers in the passenger seat of your memory.
Jim Halsey is a mere slip of a lad who is currently delivering a car from Chicago to San Diego via the West Texas desert and his sheer level of naivety is out for all to see after he pulls one of the biggest no-nos in the horror/thriller playbook – he picks up a hitchhiker. He immediately regrets his mistake as after about five minutes of Idle, yet evasive chat, it appears that the hitcher, a dead-eyed sadist named John Ryder, clearly is a few people carriers short of a car pool lane and plans to do some serious harm to his quaking good samaritan.
However, thinking admirably fast for a kid with a switch blade to his throat, Jim manages to throw Ryder from his moving vehicle and speed off, shooting and hollering that he’s managed to get one over on a possible serial killer. Of course, it isn’t actually anywhere close to being over as Ryder targets this young upstart like a laser guided missile made of pure psycho and proceeds to dog him relentlessly, killing randomly as he goes, until his simple, yet illogical demand is met.
So what is it that Ryder wants so badly? Well, all he wants is to be stopped and he wants this traumatised young man to be the one to do it, however, killing a man in cold blood, even one as coldly deranged as the hitcher is no small thing for a man to do – let alone one barely out of purity. So the chase continues and gets ever more complicated as the cops start to think that Jim us the one leaving a trail of mangled bodies in his wake.
Even with the help of gutsy truck stop waitress, Nash, how on earth is Jim supposed to end this four-wheeled nightmare when his tormentor is always at least three steps ahead?
Essentially a literal thrill ride that won’t be satisfied until your clenched jaws eventually crack a molar, The Hitcher is something of a neglected banger of a film that fuses the epic highway tension of Spielberg’s Duel with the type of complex-yet-chaotic villainy of Heath Ledger’s Joker despite arriving a full couple of decades earlier. Directed with sweaty intensity by Robert Harmon and scripted by the aptly named Eric Red (who, along with Near Dark, made something of a name for himself penning bleak, desert-set genre pieces), there literally isn’t a shred of fat on the film as it essentially dives into its nightmarish scenario right of the bat, giving us precious little time to get a sense of normality before John Ryder thumbs his way into the picture. From there on in, it’s a near string of fiendishly staged scenarios that aims its nastiest blows directly at the soft, vulnerable underbelly of your psyche that will confidently end up on any sane person’s top ten worst-case scenario list. However, after an opening reel that sees young Jim solely at the mercy of his trench-coated nemesis as he negotiates empty highways and eerily deserted truck stops, the film eventually opens its malevolent aperture to let the rest of the world in. In any other movie, this would be a relief, but in the world of The Hitcher, it just means there’s just more ways for Ryder to screw with his prey even more.
It’s a brutally instinctual way for the movie to do business and it plays up the whole tone of a waking nightmare beautifully as we stick with C. Thomas Howell’s terrified protagonist for virtually the entire ride and the fucked up situations he finds himself in never fails to make your stomach drop into you arsehole like a rollercoaster. Take the moment when Ryder admits to Jim that the abandoned car they just passed isn’t his, but in fact belongs to the last guy who gave Ryder a lift and who he apparently removed the limbs from. How about the moment when Jim lets his guard down after reaching the relative safety of a truck stop diner only to fund a human finger planted in his meal. However few moments can compare to when, having purged Ryder from his car for the first time, Jim waves at the kids in the back of a family vehicle, only for Ryder to reveal himself from their back seat as they’ve only gone and picked him up. The fact that all three of these moments occur within the first twenty minutes tells you that the filmmakers intend to pump the breaks anytime soon and thankfully, the cast is able to match the merciless pace.
Howell gives a good showing of portraying strung out fear, but as the film goes along, the relentless trials he’s put through eventually panel-beats all the youthful notions out of him in order for him to perversely make the journey to becoming a man. Also making a splash in an early role is Jennifer Jason Leigh who’s empathetic waitress not only gives Jim a much needed lifeline to cling to, but also ultimately provides one of the most notoriously grimmest cinematic moments of the entire decade. To say that The Hitcher’s pull-no-punches, nihilistic view is crystallised into this one, ghastly, spirit crushing moment is to bludgeon the nail repeatedly over the head and its use of two trucks, a lot of rope, a touchy clutch pedal and an unwinnable conundrum is genuinely comparable to the what’s in the box moment from Se7en.
Of course, I’ve saved the best for last and what really helps The Hitcher truly snap into place is the soberingly nutzoid performance of Rutger Hauer as John Ryder; a terrifying non-person who has all the intensity of Blade Runner’s Roy Blatty but none of the soul. Simply put, he’s fucking magnificent and the fact that his goals are bafflingly contradictory (“I want you to stop me.”) and the fact that he genuinely wants to teach Jim the true meaning of taking responsibility (he’ll allow Jim to take him out, but he’ll kill everyone else around him) only makes him more creepier without him having to even raise his voice higher than a whisper.
While some may argue that Spielberg’s Duel is superior, that doesn’t take anything away from a thriller that really should get more recognition than it does.
Terror with the handbrake off.
🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 