Written by Eric Red
Directed by Robert Harmon
Jim Halsey: "What do you want?"
John Ryder: "I want you to stop me."
Sometimes there's a lesson to be had. The lesson being that it's probably not a good idea to give a stranger a lift. Especially when it's a rather unhinged looking guy to begin with.
This would be a lesson that Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) learned in the worst way possible. Jim was delivering a car from Chicago to San Diego and in the West Texas desert, he made the big mistake of trying to be a help to a mysterious hitchhiker (Rutger Hauer), also known as John Ryder.
The hitchhiker himself came across as creepy from the moment he stepped into Jim's car and when Jim realised that he was a nutcase, he found a good way of getting rid of Ryder. That should've been a good thing for Jim but his day was going to get much worse.
John Ryder managed to get a lift from an unsuspecting family and still went out of his way to terrorise Jim. The family didn't survive and there was some carnage with a trucker before Jim ended up in a restaurant with bad food and a waitress named Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh).
As a character, Nash isn't the greatest but she did try to both be an accomplice to helping Jim with dealing with the overzealous John Ryder when she wasn't being sceptical of Jim's story to begin with. Unfortunately for Nash, she took was a casualty of Ryder's psychotic spree. Her death was gruesome, albeit not graphically depicted. Character wise, she's rather poor.
As for the rest of the movie, Jim had a foil in a series of genuinely incompetent coppers who failed to believe him about Ryder and then failed to keep him behind bars afterwards. There's a great but bittersweet standoff between Jim and Ryder and it's the best part of the whole movie.
- The movie spawned a 2003 sequel titled The Hitcher II: I've Been Waiting and a 2007 remake.
- As gory as the movie was, had it stuck to the original script it would've been a much gorier movie.
- Standout music: Mickey Jones Don't Stop Lovin' Me.
- Chronology: Largely set in West Texas over the course of a day.
The Hitcher (1986) has earned its right as a classic horror/thriller. Rutger Hauer gave a rather unhinged performance and C. Thomas Howell certainly made for a compelling protagonist. Both men played off each other well.
Rating: 7 out of 10
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