Movie Review: The Hitcher (1986)

A horror road movie, The Hitcher is a chilling thriller combining suspense with gore, shock, and high revving engines.

On the wide open highways through rural west Texas, Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) is a young man delivering a car from Chicago to San Diego. During a stormy night of non-stop driving Jim battles fatigue and almost dozes off behind the wheel. He picks up a hitchhiker (Rutger Hauer) to help stay awake, and immediately regrets it. His new passenger calls himself John Ryder, and his creepiness soon escalates to threats as he darkly talks of death and brandishes a knife.

Jim kicks John out of the car and speeds away, but Ryder displays an uncanny ability to catch up by hitching rides with innocents who quickly become his murder victims. At various isolated eateries and gas stations Jim tries to call for help, but only diner worker Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh) believes his story. With Ryder adept at killing then disappearing, the police suspect Jim is behind the mounting body count, and he has to flee and find a way to clear his name and escape the mysterious killer mercilessly stalking him.

Starting with Steven Spielberg's Duel and adding large doses of more explicit horror enabled by the genre's 1980s evolution, writer Eric Red conjures up an unsettling tale of evil most persistent. The inherent danger of picking up a stranger along the side of the road creates a sturdy foundation, and The Hitcher articulates every driver's dilemma: the generosity of offering help set against the minute risk of dismemberment.

Here the hitchhiker is barely defined. His name is generic, his background nonexistent. He could be anyone or no one, a man with a death wish who thrives on killing while desperately seeking to die. Ryder also works as a metaphorical outcome for perilous human behaviour. By pushing through the fatigue limit and risking falling asleep behind the wheel instead of taking a break, Jim is foolishly dancing with death. So here comes the grim reaper invited into the car, challenging Jim to vanquish death or have his life destroyed.

The Hitcher does take a couple of prolonged detours towards 1970s redneck police chase flicks, Jim and Nash escaping numerous inept cop cars, with the predictable outcome of spectacular wrecks and highway carnage. Director Robert Harmon handles the action scenes well, but for all the kinetic energy the film works much better as a slow burning tale of Ryder leaving a bloody trail to incriminate Jim and force him to understand what must be done.

Most of the gore is hinted at rather than shown, Jim's stomach churning reactions often sufficient to convey the horror unseen by the cameras. Two scenes do stand out for shock value. The first involves a misplaced digit and the second a couple of large trucks, and both earn their place as punctuation marks in the genre's history.

The film is a visual treat, Harmon creating a desolate aesthetic of empty highways, sun-baked desert and dry shrubbery under the immense Texas sky, the only hints of civilization arriving in the form of lonely diners dotting the landscape. And of course when help does arrive in the form of local police authorities, they misunderstand the threat and are no match for the unfolding butchery.

Building on his classic tragic role in Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer again nails the misunderstood monstrous presence, here adding a layer of merciless joy in doling out agony onto others. C. Thomas Howell is adequate, and Jennifer Jason Leigh marginally underutilized.

For Jim Halsey, survival is a matter of finding a path through rapidly dwindling choices while he still has some elemental control over his fate. Since death maintains ultimate dominion, The Hitcher is both cautionary and inevitable.

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Movie Review: The Outsiders (1983)

The adaptation of S.E. Hinton's youth-in-peril novel, The Outsiders is a sombre affair. Francis Ford Coppola finds the drama amongst the scrappy youth caught between childhood and adulthood, but cannot locate the soul of their anguish.

It's 1965 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the Greasers are a gang of tough kids from broken homes on the wrong side of the tracks. Ponyboy (C. Thomas Howell) is quiet and sensitive but still a Greaser, while his eldest brother Darrel (Patrick Swayze) is violent and struggling to cope with head-of-the-family responsibilities now that their parents are dead. Middle brother Sodapop (Rob Lowe) is often caught between Ponyboy and Darrel. Ponyboy's best friend is the knife-wielding, baby-faced Johnny (Ralph Macchio), and the other Greasers include Two Bit (Emilio Estevez), Steve (Tom Cruise) and Tim (Glenn Withrow). The unofficial leader of the Greasers is Dallas (Matt Dillon), who has only recently been released from jail.

While walking home, Ponyboy is attacked by members of the Socs, a rival gang of wealthier kids. Later, after Ponyboy and Johnny spend some time with middle-class girls Cherry (Diane Lane) and Marcia (Michelle Meyrink), the Socs show up to settle scores. With Ponyboy outnumbered and almost being drowned by the Socs, Johnny springs into action and uses his knife to kill one Soc and scare away the others. Dallas helps Ponyboy and Johnny to escape and hide-out in an abandoned church. But the Socs want revenge in the form of an all-out brawl between the gangs, while Ponyboy, Dallas and Johnny encounter an unexpected opportunity for heroism that takes a tragic turn.

Coppola assembled what proved to be quite the spectacular cast of young talent for The Outsiders. Rarely has a film brought together so many young actors who would go on to have long and successful careers. Ironically, Howell and Macchio, the two most prominent Greasers, would eventually have relatively lower profile adult success compared to Cruise, Swayze, Dillon, Lowe, Estevez and Lane. The talent on display enhances The Outsiders, as even small roles like Two Bit, Sodapop and Cherry are well worth watching.

In terms of the drama, The Outsiders recounts a sad story but without finding a spark to elevate it onto any sort of emotional plain. The Greasers are deserving of empathy, kids cast adrift with not a capable parent in sight, but not enough is ever revealed about them to make them anything other than kids who are likely to get into trouble. There are some touching and quiet moments as Ponyboy and Johnny hide out in an isolated church for several days, reading Gone With The Wind and sharing their innermost thoughts, but the serenity is delivered at some cost in plausibility: street-tough 14 year old kids suddenly behaving like rational adults requires quite the mental leap.

And the film cannot do much to overcome the weaknesses and derivatives in the original narrative. There are some strong whiffs of Romeo And Juliet without the romance and West Side Story without the music, while the brawl appears to mostly serve as an artificial kinetic jolt to enliven an otherwise downbeat final 60 minutes.

The 2005 "Complete Novel" re-release, a director's cut by another name, reinserts deleted scenes and adds 22 minutes to the running time. Most of the additions occur at the front end to better establish Ponyboy, the Greasers, and the context of the gang rivalry, creating a more cohesive experience. However, the complete abandonment of Carmine Coppola's evocative orchestral score, replaced by contemporary high-tempo mid-1960s hits, is a change with debatable merits.

The Outsiders has talent behind and in front of the camera that surpasses the material. The Greasers are worth a look, but the experience is not all that slick.

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Movie Review: Red Dawn (1984)

World War III starts with Soviet and Cuban soldiers invading the United States and occupying large swaths of the land of the free. But America is also the home of the brave, and in a small rural Colorado town, a group of high school teenagers take refuge in the mountains and wage guerilla warfare against the occupiers.

Red Dawn deserves some credit for imagining an outlier Cold War scenario, and examining the consequences of bringing a foreign war to the United States. The portrayal of citizen resistance against foreign occupiers in a modern global conflict is inherently intriguing. The premise could have been worthwhile, except that Red Dawn does not help itself with an asinine script courtesy of director John Milius and Kevin Reynolds.

The occupying Cuban and Soviet forces are generally portrayed as vicious buffoons, despite somehow possessing the skills to pull off a successful invasion to begin with, and the lines of dialogue throughout the movie would make an eighth grader proud. The combat sequences have a lot of bullets perforating any sense of reality with non-survivable wounds. Red Dawn does earn back some respect by not flinching from the ultimate outcome: victory has to be found within the ashes of annihilation. 

The cast features emerging and veteran talent. Patrick Swayze leads the teenage rebels, joined by his brother Charlie Sheen. C. Thomas Howell, Jennifer Grey and Lea Thompson are also in the group. Powers Boothe joins them briefly as a downed fighter pilot, and Harry Dean Stanton has a single but memorable scene as the incarcerated dad of Swayze and Sheen. Deep into the cast Ben Johnson and William Smith add colour to secondary characters.

Red Dawn's tragedy lies in the lingering impression that with an injection of just some quality, a classic was at hand. Alas, this resembles a comic book for juveniles.

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