The Hitcher Directed by Robert Harmon At the USA Pi Alley

IF YOU'VE SEEN the ads for The Hitcher on TV or the trailers at the movies, you know that the only real question facing a potential audience member is whether The Hitcher is a "good" B-rate flick or a "bad" B-rate flick. Another slasher film could have taken the urban legend style, Riders on the Storm hitchiker killer motif and made a palatable product for the sanguinary tastes of the nation's youth. But though its premise is good, The Hitcher fails to deliver, and the audience is tediously dragged over the desert highways of this misdesigned film.

The made for TV look and quality of The Hitcher is not suprising. HBO, the new financial giant of moviemaking, is responsible for this creation, which resembles one of the episodes of an HBO urban legend series called The Hitchhiker. The Hitcher will no doubt shortly replace Beastmaster on HBO's skeleton shift.

From the opening music with its subliminally mixed in strains from Psycho, the audience realizes its mistake in opening the door to this film. Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) just as quickly realizes his error in picking up hitchhiker John Ryder (Rutger Hauer) as he tools through the middle of the Southwestern desert. Contrary to what you might think, Ryder doesn't kill Halsey. He's got other plans. He frames Halsey for the murders that he commits along the road, forcing him to accept the dirty job of serving as Ryder's personal execution squad.

POOR RUTGER HAUER. A sinister delight in Blade Runner, he is trapped by poor screenwriting and character development. Hauer seems to regard his role as the methodically killing John Ryder as an irreparable joke, and therefore he plays the joke for all it's worth. When asked where he is from, Ryder quips "Disneyland," with a mocking half smile. Ryder is funny, but completely unthreatening.

Of course, with the blubbering C. Thomas Howell playing opposite him, it's hard to think of Ryder doing anything but laughing. Drawn into the maniacal web of Ryder's killings, Howell's standard emotional response is a wimpy moan, which gives way with unrealistic suddenness to the steely eyes of a newborn killer. Howell could get away with simpering seriousness in ET, but he's made it into the big time and is supposed to be capable of mature acting. Ryder should have terminated Halsey when he had the chance.

Or perhaps, the short-lived love interest should have done the job. Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a small-town girl who would rather be in California. She saves Halsey from a premature demise, only to be left in a difficult "bind" by him later in the film. With the additional suffering incurred by a woefully underdeveloped romantic relationship, Nash would be acquited of murder by a jury of her audience in the name of good taste. Leigh may be soon upstaging Jamie Lee Curtis as a queen of B-rate cinema, at least in terms of frequency of appearence therein.

MAYBE RYDER SHOULD have done some of his hatchet work on the script. A film of this dubious caliber should not try to hold an audience's attention for longer than an hour-and-a-half. So there's about an extra half hour of wandering around in the desert, getting chased by hick cops who all look the same, or watching Hauer do his imitation of The Thing That Wouldn't Die in Hitcher. Some editing could have been done, perhaps enough to make this an MTV video.

Anyway, someone should have taken this film for a ride before it reached the theaters. Anyone expecting the least bit of gory fun from this movie is in for a bad trip.