The Hitcher

An odyssey of horror and suspense that's as tightly wound as a garrote and as beautifully designed as a guillotine. [24 Feb 1986, p.81]

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

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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.

The Hitcher has a certain weight. It's not junk, and Harmon is neither a hack nor a beginner just taking his genre shot. His movie is arresting in surprising places, and it never really lets us off the hook. There's something here worth seeing, and something about Harmon as well. What will he do next, and can he top this? [27 Feb 1986, p.8]

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. Read full review

A slasher movie about gay panic, a nasty piece of homophobic angst for the age of AIDs. [25 Feb 1986]

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. Read full review

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

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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]