Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

‘The Hitcher’: On the road again

When a horror flick called “The Hitcher” hit movie screens in 1986, hitchhiking was already a dying form of social interaction due to what seemed to be a sharp and steady upswing in the number of nuts on the loose.

Two decades later, the nut ranks have continued to explode exponentially, bolstered by a surge in the crazed terrorist demographic. Nowadays, everybody’s giving everybody the hairy eyeball, and only the incredibly naive or incredibly foolish would stop to pick up a stranger on the side of the road.

But Hollywood exists in its own space-time continuum as far as that goes, and so we get a new version of “The Hitcher” that offers a few good scares and some nicely done action sequences, but in the end proves every bit as pointless as the original.

Despite crater-sized logic holes and ridiculous touches, the 1986 film, starring B-movie icon Rutger Hauer, C. Thomas Howell and a very young Jennifer Jason Leigh, has earned minor cult status among horror fans.

That’s mainly because it has one of the more memorably inventive horror-movie deaths of the ’80s, when Leigh is bound hand and foot between two trucks and then pulled apart.

The new flick restages that scene (with a twist) and remains fairly true to the original, with a number of identical scenes and lines — and the same plot holes and silliness, as well.

Replacing Leigh and Howell are Sophia Bush (of TV’s teen soap drama “One Tree Hill”) and Zachary Knighton as Grace and Jim, two college sweeties on their way from Texas to Arizona for spring break.

In a driving New Mexico rain, they pick up a stranded motorist who calls himself John Ryder (Sean Bean), intending to drop him off at the nearest motel.

But not even five minutes pass before Ryder pulls a switchblade and makes it plain that he’s a murderous sociopath. Jim and Grace manage to shove him out of the car, but back on the road, they are passed by a station wagon carrying a middle-aged suburban couple and their kids — with Ryder in the back seat playing with a teddy bear.

So begins a relentless game of cat and mouse. No matter what Jim and Grace do, they cannot seem to shake this purely evil and relentless killing machine off their tails. And it hardly helps that at every juncture offering them a choice between doing the smart thing or dumb thing, the kids go for dumb every time.

As the bodies pile up — to include a large contingent of law enforcement types — Jim and Grace realize that Ryder is seeking to frame them for his crimes. “Why are you doing this?” Jim screams in one scene. “You’re a smart kid — you can figure it out,” Ryder growls. Yet just as in the original, his motivations, if any, are never made clear.

If your expectations aren’t set too high, the action is gripping enough as it’s unspooling before your eyes, but Bean is no Hauer and Bush is no Leigh (although when called upon to act scared, Bush does have a very sexy upper-lip-curl thing going on).

And director Dave Meyers (yet another music-video refugee), working off the script originally written by Eric Red and tweaked by Jake Wall and Eric Bernt, keeps things so relentlessly nihilistic that you almost feel compelled to look for a flicker of deeper meaning.

The last two lines of dialogue, for example, raise the fleeting idea that perhaps the film is meant to be a commentary on the desensitization of our society to the ever-rising tide of gratuitous violence in popular culture — for example, in films just like this one! Ha ha! Oh, the irony!

In the same vein, if you hold your breath and squint really hard, some of the late-inning plot developments may seem to take the form of a feminist statement, particularly when contrasted with how the story plays out in the original film.

Then again, sometimes a Twinkie is just a Twinkie — you know it’s all empty calories and you shouldn’t really eat it, but you do anyway. It offers fleeting pulses of pleasure going down.

And then you feel guilty.

2 stars. Rated R for violence.