Let me start that I did like Hitcher in the Dark (Paura nel buio). No matter how this review comes off.
This Umberto Lenzi movie came out in 1989, near the end of the long-running Italian horror movie craze. It has little of the perverse style of many of the better pictures of its type. The DVD bills this as a giallo, but ti bears little resemblance to most of the ones I’ve seen. Unlike the majority of them, we know who the killer is right from the start, and it looks as if it were filmed by a TV crew. Which it probably was.
A dirty rotten killer (aren’t they all?) is haunting the back roads of Virginia Beach in an RV, looking for a surrogate for his lost Mama. He picks up young women and dopes them and tries to make them into her. He picks one girl, who has just split with her boyfriend and the fun begins. It’s a road story of rape and revenge.
Our killer dumps a girl into a swampy creek early on and an alligator claims the body. Huh? I’ve lived here in Virginia most of my life and I’ve spent a bit of time in swamps and I’ve never seen a gator. Neither has anyone I’ve ever heard of. That’s probably the funniest part of this movie. Add the ridiculous supporting characters and funky fusion jazz score and mix and stir and you get a real potboiler. No wonder Lenzi used his “Humphrey Humbert” pseudonym for this one.
Oddly, Shriek Show had Hitcher in the Dark in their High School Horrors Triple Feature. Odd indeed, because there isn’t a school in sight, or do any of the participants appear to be close to school age. College maybe, but high school? Uh uh.
But it isn’t a terrible movie. We go into these things not expecting Hitchcock. Or even Argento. However, Lenzi made some far superior films to Hitcher in the Dark, like Cannibal Holocaust, Man From Deep River and the deliriously over-the-top Paranoia. It reminds me of a recent Italian movie I watched from around the same time: Lamberto Bava’s Delirium. Neither of these are awful, but they both have a generic, Lifetime Channel Movie ambience to them.
This Umberto Lenzi movie came out in 1989, near the end of the long-running Italian horror movie craze. It has little of the perverse style of many of the better pictures of its type. The DVD bills this as a giallo, but ti bears little resemblance to most of the ones I’ve seen. Unlike the majority of them, we know who the killer is right from the start, and it looks as if it were filmed by a TV crew. Which it probably was.
A dirty rotten killer (aren’t they all?) is haunting the back roads of Virginia Beach in an RV, looking for a surrogate for his lost Mama. He picks up young women and dopes them and tries to make them into her. He picks one girl, who has just split with her boyfriend and the fun begins. It’s a road story of rape and revenge.
Our killer dumps a girl into a swampy creek early on and an alligator claims the body. Huh? I’ve lived here in Virginia most of my life and I’ve spent a bit of time in swamps and I’ve never seen a gator. Neither has anyone I’ve ever heard of. That’s probably the funniest part of this movie. Add the ridiculous supporting characters and funky fusion jazz score and mix and stir and you get a real potboiler. No wonder Lenzi used his “Humphrey Humbert” pseudonym for this one.
Oddly, Shriek Show had Hitcher in the Dark in their High School Horrors Triple Feature. Odd indeed, because there isn’t a school in sight, or do any of the participants appear to be close to school age. College maybe, but high school? Uh uh.
But it isn’t a terrible movie. We go into these things not expecting Hitchcock. Or even Argento. However, Lenzi made some far superior films to Hitcher in the Dark, like Cannibal Holocaust, Man From Deep River and the deliriously over-the-top Paranoia. It reminds me of a recent Italian movie I watched from around the same time: Lamberto Bava’s Delirium. Neither of these are awful, but they both have a generic, Lifetime Channel Movie ambience to them.
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