The Hitcher (1986, Robert Harmon) (Patreon)

53/100

Spoilers ahoy.

Always assumed this was set almost entirely in a moving vehicle—Taste of Cherry as cheesy thriller. Turns out I was half-right, since it does involve a man hitching a ride and enlisting the driver's assistance in his bizarre suicide attempt. That premise makes zero sense here, unless you charitably assume that Ryder sought someone worthy of dispatching him (as opposed to just committing suicide-by-cop, which he could obviously do at any time), and then even more charitably assume that Jim "Please Don't Hurt Me" Halsey is just the adversary he's looking for. Despite having been a teenager in the ’80s, I'd actually never seen C. Thomas Howell in anything, apart from E.T. (in which I guess he must be one of Elliott's cycling friends) and a few TV episodes; while he's admirably willing to look uncool in this role, responding to threats with a decidedly non-heroic degree of terror, he never makes Halsey credible as someone upon whom Ryder would fixate. Hauer's memorably creepy performance notwithstanding, The Hitcher arguably works best when Ryder recedes for a while, having framed Halsey for various murders. Much of the middle stretch plays like a straightforward wrong-man saga, with Jennifer Jason Leigh lending her then-trademark diffidence to the de rigueur Woman Who Believes Him. Her subsequent fate (speaking of middle stretch) suggests the gorier film that screenwriter Eric Red (who'd subsequently write Near Dark) evidently had in mind; instead, first-time director Robert Harmon (who now appears exclusively to helm TV-movies starring Tom Selleck as Robert B. Parker's Jesse Stone) downplays the violence in favor of reasonably effective suspense, fashioning the sort of generic nailbiter that was ubiquitous on video-store shelves when I was a kid. But I gather it's the nasty elements that people remember, even though most are implied.

One element I very much appreciated: no backstory. Like Duel, The Hitcher doesn't bother to "establish" the hero's circumstances before he set out on this particular trip; we eventually learn that Halsey is driving a stranger's car to San Diego, via some service that connects travelers with people who need vehicles transported for some reason, but the details of his personal life remain completely unknown. Because who cares. Nothing would be gained by opening the film with bland, forgettable shots of Halsey picking up the car or packing his shit in the trunk or saying goodbye to his girlfriend or whatever useless throat-clearing we'd surely get nowadays. "Once upon a time a guy stopped to pick up a hitchhiker on a lonely road." Cool, then what happened? I mean, maybe don't make it a hitchhiker who massacres half the Midwest just to induce some kid to shoot him, that's really dumb, but at least you started in the right place.