- Directed by Robert Harmon
- Written by Eric Red
- Starring
- C. Thomas Howell
- Rutger Hauer
- Jennifer Jason Leigh
- Jeffrey DeMunn
- John M. Jackson
It’s story time, so pull up a chair.
The summer I was sixteen, I stayed with my grandparents on Prince Edward Island and worked in my grandfather’s woodshop. One week, Granddad had to go over to Halifax, Nova Scotia for some medical tests and Grandmama went with him. (They felt absolutely no qualms leaving me alone. I was an incredibly unwild kid, and would get into no more trouble than was available on their Basic Plus cable package.)
Just so I wouldn’t get too terribly lonely, they arranged for me to go over to a friend of the family’s house for dinner. As he was driving me back home, I had him stop at a grocery store with a little wall of rental videos so I’d have something to watch (Basic Plus cable really wasn’t that great). I came out with The Hitcher.
The psychopathic version of Matthew 7:3.
“Ooh,” David said, “you really don’t want to watch that alone.”
“Come on,” I said. “I eat Freddy and Jason for breakfast. No sweat.” (Did I mention that I was sixteen, and thus, by definition, an idiot?)
“Freddy and Jason aren’t scary. This is. But I guess since you’ve already paid for it and all…”
And he dropped me off with a knowing little twinkle in his eye.
An hour and a half later, there I am, all alone in a big creaky house in the country, sitting with my feet up under me because I didn’t want them on the floor, screaming at the television but unable to look away.
When I tried to go to bed later, I left a light on. And I took one of Granddad’s antique samurai swords that he picked up in Japan after the war and put it beside the bed.
“I think you’re swell, but Mr. Fluffy HATES you!”
I’m more than twice as old now, and obviously I already know what’s going to happen in the story (there are many movies that have faded from my memory, but this is not one of them), so the current viewing didn’t have nearly the same effect on me. (And boy, did my wife appreciate that.) But time and perspective haven’t weakened my estimation of this movie. It’s a grand example of unrelenting tension and peril, moody and stark, and it hits the first-time viewer like a fist in the gut.
Young Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) is in the middle of a cross-country trip, driving a nice car from Chicago to its eager owner in California. The long stretches of empty road in Texas in the early morning start to take their toll on him, and after a sleepy close-encounter with a semi, he’s eager to pick up a hitcher standing in the rain.
His grateful passenger identifies himself as John Ryder (Rutger Hauer), and proceeds to be every motorist’s nightmare of a calmly psychotic murderer. Jim only escapes by the sheer luck of the passenger door not quite being latched, and drives on in nervous triumph, leaving Ryder behind on the blacktop.
“But I don’t know the Texas A&M fight song!”
But that would be a really short movie, so it’s not far into the next day when a station wagon passes Jim, carrying a cute little nuclear family — and Ryder. The father is too dumb to realize that somebody shouting and making waving motions means “pull over,” and Jim’s car almost gets plowed by a bus. By the time Jim catches up to the station wagon again, it’s sitting on the shoulder, doors ajar, with no one left alive.
And thus begins the chase, as Ryder pursues Jim — not to kill him, but to kill those around him. And worse, to make it look like Jim did it. Along the way, Jim picks up Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a local girl who rescues him when the local deputies, enraged by the murders around them including some of their own, almost exercise frontier justice on Jim, the only suspect they can find. Together, Jim and Nash try hopelessly to stay ahead of a sociopathic genius.
Frankly, I can’t imagine this movie working at all with anyone but Rutger Hauer in the role of John Ryder. Hauer’s incredibly commanding presence here makes Ryder a psychopath unlike either the fractured, raging serial killers or the wry and giggly mass murderers we see too often. He exudes such an air of power and control that it becomes completely believable for Ryder to anticipate Jim’s every move, arrive at every stop, kill those around him, and vanish effortlessly. Ryder is as unstoppable as a force of nature, coupled with a malevolent intelligence and focus that refuses to let Jim out of his path, for reasons that he never condescends to explain. When Jim, broken and tired of running, asks Ryder yet again why he’s doing this, Ryder simply replies, “You’re a smart kid. Figure it out.”
Ooh. Pritty.
All of this gains dreamlike high contrast against the backdrop of a Texas desert populated only by occasional travelers and a random scattering of gas stations in varying stages of abandonment. And supporting it all from beneath is Mark Isham’s plain, almost minimalist score that offers us no comfort or respite.
You can see that my plot description is spare, simply because I can’t bring myself to pad the punches for anyone who hasn’t seen it. As good as the movie still is on later viewings, there’s nothing that can match that initial reaction to a movie which doesn’t highlight cruelty for its own exploitative sake, but which still strings out first-time viewers with tension and then sucker-punches them repeatedly. So I can’t tell you about the French fry scene, or the deputy’s station scene, or the bus scene, or…
Imagine this scene on a pan-and-scan videocassette.
See it. But don’t see it alone in the night in a big old empty house. You have been warned.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 19
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 5
- dream sequences: 1
- ominous thunderstorms: 1
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
- Armin Shimerman (the interrogation sergeant) appeared twice as Ferengis on TNG before landing the role of Quark on DS9
- Henry Darrow (Trooper Hancock) played “Admiral Savar” in the TNG episode “Conspiracy,” and “Kolopak” on two episodes of Voyager
- Tony Epper (Trooper Connors) played “Drunken Klingon” in the DS9 episode “Apocalypse Rising”
