The Hitcher

Starring everybody's favourite Dutchman, Rutger Hauer, this superb road movie thriller is tense, thrilling and superbly atmospheric.

The first scene between the Hitcher and Jim Holsey was superb, Rutger puts in a chilling performance. Mr Hauer has a reputation for pulling off some memorable bad guy performances, namely this, Blade runner and Nighthawks, but this is my favourite of his performances. The lines he has were brilliant. The pacing of the film was very good and apart from Rutger stealing the show the other actors were good. Jennifer Jason Leigh was good in her small role and of course C Thomas Howell in the lead does a good job. Overall this gets a 9/10 from me.

This is just a perfectly executed 80s action/thriller/horror film. Rutger Hauer owns his role and is genuinely terrifying. Ignore the bad reviews, this is a masterpiece!

Rutger Hauer owns The Hitcher. He hitches a ride with C Thomas Howell and he soon regrets his goodwill. People are killed along the way and the good Samaritan finds himself in deep doo doo. JJ Leigh appears as a waitress who gets tied up with the events. Howell spirals into Dante's Inferno with cops on the chase. Although farfetched I was entertained by the movie.

A cat spends the day chasing a mouse. When he finally corners the mouse, he takes sadistic delight in batting it around, playing with it before it goes in for the kill. The cat wishes to savor the look of fear on its prey, instead of merely indulging the reward it's worked so hard to catch. This is the predator/prey relationship evidenced in "The Hitcher," one of the most relentlessly intense and mean-spirited horror films ever made.

Since the setting is the desert, I suppose it would make more sense to call John Ryder (played by Rutger Hauer) a vicious coyote, who is picked up one rainy night by a stray lamb named Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell). Ryder, who's apparently been murdering people all over the desert, is looking to do the same with Halsey, who cheats death only to be tormented for the rest of the film by this savage predator. The coyote craves a challenge--in fact, he seems to live for it.

Nothing else needs to be said. "The Hitcher" relies so heavily on a plot that weaves in and out of 'the expected' that any further description would spoil the fun. The two leads are excellent--Rutger Hauer has created one of the great villains of modern cinema, and C. Thomas Howell is a sympathetic and believable victim driven to madness. While the film isn't necessarily deep, the high-energy cast, moody desert settings and twisty script fuel this effort for 98 intense minutes. 3.5 stars out of 5.

Yes, this movie would be remade years later with Sean Bean cast as the hitchhiker that likes to play some rather brutal games and one has to wonder why. Rutger Hauer was perfectly cast here as the psycho and his performance could not have been topped. Maybe they felt the need for a female lead rather than the male one because you know how females never get the chance to be the main character who survives in a horror movie (heavy sarcasm here). This is basically a story of a young man driving in the middle of nowhere who looks to have been very bored and in the need of some company. He finds some in the form of a hitchhiker and suffice to say he should have listened to all the warnings he got of hitchhikers, but on the plus side his travels in the middle of nowhere are about to be a lot less dull. You get a great scene as the two opponents as it were square off for the first time with the young man seemingly getting the better of the hitcher in round one. Unfortunately, everyone in this desert seems to be to kind for their own good as the guy sees the psycho in a car with a family. So other face-offs with this hitcher are coming up and some will be very violent indeed. A rather good thriller/horror type movie with my main complaint coming towards the end as how was he not handled better than that? Other than that you get a very good and chilling game of cat and mouse and you get a performance by Hauer that could not have possibly been beat.