Recensioni di Metacritic

A stunner of unrelenting tension interrupted by action, violence and gore.

Feature debuts don't come much better than director Robert Harmon and screenwriter Eric Red's sleek, dream-like thriller about a naïve college boy who crosses paths with devil in the flesh after taking a wrong turn on some lost highway.

There's a little toying with the old doppelgänger idea of the hero and villain coming to resemble one another, and the ending is rather straightforward; but it's a highly competent sick-fright version of the evergreen chase formula.

It's hard to wholeheartedly recommend The Hitcher. Sadistic and graphically, pointlessly violent, it may leave most sickened. But it is also a distressingly effective thriller, with plenty of scalp-tingling, seat- clutching squeals on wheels. And here's betting you'll check the back seat of your car after you leave.

Much of the problem lies with Howell, a dilute, rabbity actor in the Tim Hutton mold. Everyone acts Howell off the screen, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, who displays an easeful gruffness as the girl who joins Jim. With Howell's weightlessness, the deeper elements of the story -- the byplay between guilt and innocence, for example -- never accumulate.

Existential terror, in the case of Robert Harmon's Hitcher, means an unmotivated viciousness that's as cryptic at the story's end as it was at the beginning.

The Hitcher is a highly unimaginative slasher that keeps the tension going with a massacre about every 15 minutes.

It's a cheap, easy rehash of Spielberg's "Duel" and "The Hitchhiker" (which Red may not have seen)--along with grabs from "Halloween" (the unstoppable fiend), "Jackson County Jail" (the innocent motorist driven outside the law) and "Straw Dogs" (manhood through blood rites). Nothing is original.

On its own terms, this movie is diseased and corrupt. I would have admired it more if it had found the courage to acknowledge the real relationship it was portraying between Howell and Rutger, but no: It prefers to disguise itself as a violent thriller, and on that level it is reprehensible.

A nauseating thriller that reaches down from the screen and defies you to stay in the theater to see what desecration of the human body it will present next. [24 Feb 1986, p.C3]