In almost forty after the flop of its release, Hitcher has gradually established itself as a cult thriller at the crossroads of the most terrible perversions.
Night falls on Route 66, and fatigue dangerously weighs down the eyes of a very young C. Thomas Howell. A missed encounter with the front bumper of a heavy goods vehicle later, the guy passes the sodden silhouette of a hitchhiker and naively imagines that a traveling companion will allow him to disturb the boredom and push away the arms of ‘Orpheus. “ My mother told me never to do that », he exclaims with a smile on his lips as he opens his door to this complete stranger.
In an ideal world, Jim Halsey drops his passenger off somewhere along the way and drives safely to California. But in the world of screenwriter Eric Red, Jim Halsey would have done better to listen to the wise advice of his darling little mama. A pseudo-horror and resolutely perverse thriller, this first feature film by converted photographer Robert Harmon offers a game of cat and mouse between an antagonist with no particular motivations, and a hero pushed to his most intimate limits.
Moral of the film: Mom is always right
boulevard of death
It is by listening to the Riders on the storm of the Doors that the premise of the story came to Red. Having recently celebrated his twenty-third birthday, the apprentice screenwriter leaves the urban landscape of his native Manhattan for Texas. The journey stretches, emptiness gives way to buildings while the horizon becomes a little further away as the kilometers pass. Red then exorcises his anxiety with large strokes of scribbles and gives birth in a few months to a first nervous draft which he sends right and left in stride.
Judge too gory, too violent, too pernicious, Tea Hitcher however, required significant rewriting before being considered marketable in Hollywood. There, it passed through the hands of multiple studios such as Warner Bros, Universal Pictures and 20th Century Fox, which was briefly attached to it. But the goal is the same: everyone takes the project like a hot potato. Through a fortunate combination of circumstances, the scenario nevertheless piqued the interest of HBO vice-president, Maurice Singer, who promptly launched the film on track.
There was also talk of an eyeball hidden in a hamburger
In 1986, the film hit theaters. But despite winning a handful of awards at the Cognac Police Film Festival, he suffers a bitter failure at home. In addition to the company’s commercial flop (which only grossed $5.8 million for an estimated budget of $6 million), critics seem to be happy to assassinate the film. The famous Roger Ebert was particularly virulent in his Chicago-Sun Times column, describing the finished product as “ sick and corrupt “. Aouch.
