The Hitcher ***** (1986, Rutger Hauer, C Thomas Howell, Jennifer Jason Leigh) – Classic Movie Review 400

Director Robert Harmon’s awesome 1986 cult psycho horror thriller The Hitcher is a gruesomely terrifying thrill ride. It takes as tenacious a hold on the minds and sensibilities of the audience as its villain Rutger Hauer does on the callow young hero C Thomas Howell, who very, very foolishly stops the car he is transporting to another state in the rain and gives him a lift.

The second rule of horror movies, after don’t stray from the path, is don’t give a lift to strangers. Don’t characters in chillers ever watch movies at all? Obviously not, otherwise there could be any new horror movies. This one manages to make Howell’s decision to pick up the hitcher entirely plausible, though, and the movie motors on its unusual plot plausibility and character credibility. No wrong turns here.

Unfortunately for the good Samaritan, Hauer’s John Ryder character turns out to be the archetypal psychopathic sadistic boogeyman, a classic monster who won’t just let Howell’s Jim Halsey character alone, while gleefully killing everyone else in sight. John Ryder seems like a reasonable kind of a guy, but actually he’s a cunning and relentless stalker and serial killer.

Incredibly intense and harrowing, The Hitcher couldn’t be more grippingly handled and it is extremely adroitly played by both fired-up actors in their prime. The alert, imaginative script by Eric Red soon, and extremely unpleasantly, abandons the female love-interest character (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to tackle the implied homosexuality of the main relationship.

Not many boogeymen chase after other men in the movies, and the film gets its freshness and a lot of mileage out of this theme. The plot plays like a perverted crypto coming-out story with the Howell character simply denying his latent gayness and Hauer trying to break down his defences.

Leigh’s fate is particularly nasty, in its casual offhand grislyness. Leigh out of the way, the men, meanwhile, can carry on their weird S and M cat-and-mouse game.

Director Harmon whips up a great mood of fear, hysteria and paranoia while keeping it still credible. Technically, it’s a sleek piece of work and the cinematography by John Seale and score by Mark Isham are first-rate. Acting-wise, it’s spot-on perfection, too. Hauer makes a marvellous villain as John Ryder and Howell pitches his youthful mounting panic just right as Jim Halsey and Leigh does a good job of her lady in peril role as Nash, the truck stop waitress who tries to help Jim.

Other variants on this popular theme are Road Kill [Joy Ride], Breakdown and Jeepers Creepers. But, despite lots of similar movies since, the 1986 The Hitcher is wearing extremely well. It hasn’t dated at all and is still one of the best of its kind.

It was remade as The Hitcher in 2007, appallingly, with Sean Bean.

RIP Rutger Hauer (1944–2019). Best known for Blade Runner (as Roy Batty) and The Hitcher, he won a Golden Globe for Escape from Sobibor (1987). He also appeared in Nighthawks, Eureka, The Osterman Weekend, A Breed Apart, Ladyhawke, Flesh and Blood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) as Lothos, Surviving the Game, Sin City (2005) as Cardinal Roark, Batman Begins (2005) as Earle and Hobo with a Shotgun (2011) as Hobo.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 400

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