Hitcher In The Dark Review

MPAA Rating: NR
Released: 1989

Slit throats. Gratuitous nudity. Gorgeous women. A psycho with a serious Oedipus complex. These are just some of the elements splashed together in Italian director Umberto Lenzi's horror flick Hitcher in the Dark. Sounds like a winning formula for success, right?

Well, I forgot mention a few other attributes that the film possesses, such as inane dialogue, laughable acting and a low budget. While that last sentence was more than enough to send casual or highbrow movie viewers running for the hills, true B-movie horror fans know that such traits come with the territory and are prepared to bravely face the Feature Attraction…

I am a serious fan of The Hitcher, a tense 80's horror masterpiece starring Rutger Hauer as a madman that terrorizes a young man that stops to give him a ride. Heck, I'm a fan of hitchhiking horror flicks period – watching people tempt fate by picking up (or accepting a ride from) a complete stranger with unknown motives makes for intriguing possibilities. So it's with this background that I decided to give Hitcher in the Dark a try. I knew it would be nowhere near the quality of the aforementioned classic, but it didn't matter; how badly can you screw up a formula virtually built for success?

Apparently quite a bit!

The movie starts off with a certain degree of promise… sorta. A well-built blonde is hitchhiking, so a young guy named Mark Glazer (Joe Balogh) pulls his camper to the side of the road and picks her up. As they are cruising down the street she profusely thanks him for the ride and remarks about how none of the other son of a bi**hes would take the time to stop for her. Suddenly he jams on the brakes, sending her head flying into the dashboard as he indignantly objects to being called a son of a bi**h, which of course she never did. The whole incident leaves her a bit dazed and confused – and myself, for that matter. Was this a case of a crappy script or is this Mark fellow supposed to be an oddball?

The next scene suggests the latter, actually, as we now see the gal in an unclad state lying on the camper bed with her throat slashed. Meanwhile, Mark is busy snapping Polaroid photos of the rather grisly site. Of course boredom eventually takes its toll, so he decides to dispose of the body in a local swamp by feeding it to a crocodile. All in all, it was a fair start to a horror film, despite some horribly atrocious acting by the parties involved.

While cruising the streets of Virginia Beach, where all the cool and scantily clad kids hang out, he stumbles across a stunningly beautiful girl named Daniela Foster (Josie Bissett). He's instantly smitten with her and is determined to introduce her to the backseat of his camper for presumably nefarious reasons. Seeing as how Daniela recently had an argument with her boyfriend Kevin (Jason Saucier), she accepts Mark's offer for a ride in order to put some space between her and her ex.

It's around this point in Hitcher in the Dark where Mark confirms his pure, unadulterated insanity. He handcuffs Daniela to his bed and starts professing his love for his mother, proudly showing the kidnapped girl a photo of the focus of his disturbing Oedipus complex. At this point we see he's a bit disturbed, but we haven't entered the realms of insanity just yet.

Next he injects her with a sedative to knock her out and then proceeds to hack off much of Daniela's long blonde locks so that it's shoulder length just like his mother. In addition he dyes her hair brown… coincidentally enough, the same shade as his dear mother's. Okay… now he's officially insane. The prior murders, kidnapping fetish and mama fascination were a bit disturbing, but chopping away those gorgeous locks of blonde hair is just plain unexplainable.

Apparently Mark is a horny little nutcase, too, because he wastes no time stripping away all of her clothes and maneuvering her unconscious form into highly erotic poses, snapping pictures of each. He definitely had an eye for comely women and sexy poses… were it not for his bad habit of killing hitchhikers, he could easily have gotten a job as a Playboy photographer!

At any rate, the rest of Hitcher in the Dark entails Daniela trying to keep alive by manipulating the nutcase until she has an opportunity to escape.

From start to finish, the acting in this movie is reprehensibly awful… and not in a campy fun way either. It just plain sucks. Joe Balogh looks like a sissy pretty boy, not a demented psycho, and his acting is more wooden and unnatural than the dead tree in my backyard. Like that darn tree, every time I had to look at him I just wanted to take an axe to it.

But let me be fair to Balogh… he's not the only one that stunk like a construction worker's armpit after 12 hours in the 90-degree sun. Each of the victims and secondary actors were as bad as him, and a few even worse if that can be believed.

The only ray of hope amongst these atrocious actors was Josie Bissett. Hitcher in the Dark was her first film, and although she was still pretty new to the whole thing in this movie, overall she did a good job with what she had to work with. Because she could actually act, she almost felt out of place – kinda like Sean Connery performing in a porno flick.

Speaking of Sean Connery, some have said he's such a superior actor that he could make reading lines out of a phone book sound interesting, and I happen to agree. Well, Josie Bissett is so stunningly beautiful that one could watch her reading lines out of a phone book and be quite pleased. I'm not the only one to have made this observation either, for she was nominated as one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world by People magazine in 1996. As bad as the movie got at times, she always provided more than enough eye candy to keep things bearable.

Hitcher in the Dark was a bad film… plain and simple. Despite its cool hybrid of The Hitcher and Psycho elements, this film really cannot be defended, so I won't bother trying to. But even with all its failings, I never really had the urge to shut it off. In fact, I actually wanted to see it through to the end. This means either I am as nutty as our film's protagonist, or this movie's mindlessly violent and twisted premise combined with its plentiful full-body nudity helps it slip into the guilty pleasure category, albeit barely.

Movie rating: 4 stars

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