The Hitcher

CinemaVoid 🏴‍☠️2.5

A serial killer with dreamy eyes got the hots for ponyboy and will teleport anywhere to kill offscreen.

Adam Nayman4.5

Makes so much more sense when you realize it doesn't have to make any sense: it's an anxiety-dream movie, and Howell waking up in the police station to a suddenly unlocked cell door and that roaming German Shepherd is pure, hushed, oneiric horror - closer to A Nightmare on Elm Street than Duel. Or maybe Nightmare 2 since the queer reading here rests pretty close to the surface, played up almost instantly when the road worker refers to Howell and Hauer as "sweethearts" and carried through all the way to the last scene, which seems all about one character exorcising something about himself (his sexuality? his fear? his mercy?) by killing off somebody else (the same thing that the Coens would do against a near-identical desert backdrop the next year in Raising Arizona). Terrifically well-shot, edited, acted and scored, confident but not ostentatious and pretty darn disgusting without acting like it deserves a medal for it.

Josh Lewis5.0

Joins Road Games as one of the great cat-and-mouse road thriller logic movies (think Duel or Breakdown) but taken to horror extremes. A philosophical western slasher with gorgeous anamorphic frames of endless California vistas and the ostensible freedom of the road infected by Rutger Hauer who is just a slimy, almost supernatural force of pure random cruelty and destruction that the protagonists are forced to manically (and eventually mournfully react to) in one insane action setpiece after another. The body count is cartoonish but violence is always lean and ugly, and by the final reel this transforms into that rare genre movie that is both ruthlessly blunt and stripped down to the essential but still dripping with existential mood.The key here is its unsubtle sledgehammer assault style merged with eerie psychological ambiguity: is Ryder a vengeful spirit from another realm? Is he Jim’s (and by extension the mythic western man’s) own capabilities for evil? Is he just a random serial killer taking the piss? Is this all a half-remembered dream of a kid falling asleep at the wheel? An apocalyptically felt depiction of a boy becoming a man via this ominous ambient world of absurdly cruel violence? John Seale's haunting, hypnotizing photography makes any or even all of the above possible in this dusty, disturbing story of masculine death drive, transformation and exorcism. Front-to-back it’s practically just a never-ending onslaught of cryptic, sadistic torment.The purgatorial mood of it is just to die for and perfectly compliments the surreal allegorical approach to its storytelling that is torturous and terrifying and tantalizingly enigmatic in equal measure. I understand why some can't deal with it or find its gruesome extremity juvenile/vulgar but the sheer evil intensity of it is undeniably impressive and for whatever fucked up reason this is the exact ratio of mean/vile content + beautiful formal trickery that I really respond to.Full discussion on ep 222 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.