THE HITCHER
So, would YOU pick up a stranger?
Watching this movie tonight, I realized that I was anticipating every word of every line of the entire film; that's how many times I've seen it since I first watched it as a new release. My memory must be pretty good, because this is the first viewing of this film during which I actually noted that the hero and heroine were younger than myself (the actors were 19 and 23 respectively at the time). And yet, it's not a movie I've given a lot of thought to; it works most as a visceral thriller, and any attempts to read much into it seem to always slide into collapse.
If you think Ebert was hard on The Ghost And The Darkness, his zero-star review for The Hitcher makes it clear just how much he can dislike a movie ("diseased and corrupt...it is reprehensible", he sez). While this time around, he doesn't seem like it caught him on an off day (he raises a number of good points), I can't agree with him here either. The crypto-S&M relationship between the leads aside, as a thriller, The Hitcher works; it's fast-paced, well-made and seductively scary. That it constructs itself as a series of increasingly inevitable encounters that work out in ludicrously unlikely ways just makes its villain even creepier; not quite supernatural in his power, but what the hell ISN'T this guy capable of?
Rutger Hauer stars as the presumably pseudonymous John Ryder, a hitchhiker who one day is picked up in the rainy Texas desert by a hapless young man named Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell). Ryder makes his homicidal intentions clear soon enough, and Halsey barely (and through rather unlikely means) escapes with his life. But Ryder doesn't like leaving things left undone, it seems, and keeps showing up in Halsey's cross-country journey, bringing death, danger, and despair at every turn, incidentally leaving the cops to conclude that Halsey is the homicidal maniac in this movie. Why? Because only Halsey knows how to find the fabled Jade Monkey...no, wait, that's not why. I don't know why. Don't feel bad if you don't either. I'd be surprised if even screenwriter Eric "Near Dark" Red knew. (my own guess? He wants to turn somebody into not just a killer, but a murderer. That, of course, just begs another "why".)
Hauer is wonderful here, creepy and elegant, and just charismatic enough that despite all the awful things he does, I always find myself half cheering for him anyway. Even though he demonstrates no shortage of sadism, cruelty, and loathing for the world and himself, I find this guy, well, likeable, kind of. Now that's star power. It's probably his best villain role, that in Blade Runner not being really a villain. Howell does his job surprisingly well for a guy who never otherwise put in a good performance in his life. At first, he's convincingly meek and helpless, and hardens over the course of the film through despair and borderline madness into something grim, determined, and not at all what he once was.
Jennifer Jason Leigh is also here as Nash, a truck stop waitress who believes Halsey's story (whereas the cops all think he's the one doing the killing). Of particular note is Jeffrey DeMunn (and his cavernously big nostrils) as a police captain who's the first cop to actually take Halsey's side. Well, the first who isn't killed immediately. alt.horror's own Homer made a comment, responding to my review for The Stepfather, about how sometimes, you see a performance by an actor and forever after you find yourself paying particular attention to them when they show up in brief roles in other films? Bingo. (except O'Quinn got the better role in the X-Files movie) He doesn't get a lot here, but what he gets sure makes an impression.
The story, it must be said, doesn't hold a whole lot of water upon inspection. It's awfully (in)convenient that Halsey can't remember the name of the guy whose car he's driving, but remembers a phone number (which gets no answer, of course). Ryder's such a good shot that he can take down a helicopter, with a handgun, while driving a truck, off-road! To set up one (admittedly effective) scare, Halsey eats his french fries in a way I've never seen anyone do - takes a bite, sets it down, picks up another. The police work in this movie is as shoddy as I've ever seen, except maybe in Video Murders; a number of scenes depend on nobody noticing this big, nasty black truck that Ryder's driving, and on a desert road with nothing else in sight, these things are hard to miss. And I suppose that "the impetuousness of youth", or something, might partially explain why Nash thinks Halsey is innocent, but with what information she'd been given, she'd have to be a fool to conclude that with enough certainty to go to the lengths she goes to in sticking with him.
I could go on, but you get the point. Normally, I hate this kind of "it's scarier because it doesn't make sense!" shit, but here, the inanity kind of helped; Ryder became a boogeyman of sorts, and you can't get away from the boogeyman just by sleeping on the couch which it can't hide under. But please, PLEASE somebody tell me what the whole "pennies on the eyes" thing is about. Really. I've seen this, and heard references to this, all over the place and I have no idea what it means. I just know it's out of some folktale or work of literature or something, but I'm lost here!
Much of the this plays less as a horror film than an action movie, with shootouts, car chases, exploding gas stations, crashing helicopters...it resembles the Mad Max movies more than any slasher flick you'd care to name. Director Robert Harmon sure knows how to film an action sequence, and a number of scenes here are thrilling, alternately in a fun way and a scary way. Why he didn't go on to much else (a couple of TV projects and a Van Damme movie), I don't know.
The Hitcher is lushly photographed, giving the desert a kind of gray, lifeless beauty of its own. I wish I'd seen it on the big screen, but hey, I was twelve. Credit must go to cinematographer John Seale, who's worked on more gorgeous-looking movies than I can name. We'd see much of the same idea put into the visuals of Near Dark, but not as well as it's done here.
This didn't cause all that much of a stir upon its initial release, but it became one of those movies that everybody my age has seen. The level of violence in this movie - both on-screen and implied - raised a number of eyebrows at the time. I couldn't really tell you if R-rated movies have gotten less or more violent since 1985, and maybe it says more about myself than anything else that it doesn't seem that extreme. I hear a sequel is in the works, not exactly something the world's clamoring for, but it'd be nice to see Hauer doing something that didn't go straight to video. Which it may well do anyway.
Irrelevant trivia: this movie features the first movie phone number I'd ever heard that didn't start with 555. Watch for Armin "Quark from Deep Space Nine" Shimerman as a police psychologist, or something. And there is this one hilarious moment, possibly a goof, that I didn't notice until this time. When Halsey cries "He put that there, he put that there!" and one cop slams him back down on the car hood, one of his feet flies up and kicks the other cop in the back of the head! Man, I'd never seen that before. I had to watch it again five times before I stopped laughing. It was right up there with the first time I noticed that stormtrooper whacking his head on the low doorway in Star Wars, except here, I didn't have to have it pointed out to me.
As to the subject header - I owe it to the world to do it once, having been picked up myself about five or six years ago. Just not when I'm the only one in the car.