? Yet another horror remake finds Sean Bean essaying the Rutger Hauer role from the 1986 cult hit. As the title character, he menaces two college sweethearts on a road trip through rural America.
+ Basically what this
has going for it is that it’s fairly scary while only moderately gruesome,
excepting one key scene toward the end. Bean is aptly non-emotive, and the plot
doesn’t rely on the kids being complete idiots, or the cops never being around.
There’s even one cop who seems to know what he’s doing.
- That’s not to say
the movie shies away from other horror staples. The villain seems to have the
tracking abilities of a bloodhound and never makes a mistake except when he
encounters the college kids. I mean, even I anticipated the way one college boy
gets away when he’s driving and has a knife to his throat. And you have to
figure from the premise that either that the Hitcher has killed hundreds of
people before in an obvious way and gotten away with it or that he decided in
middle age to become randomly, and expertly, homicidal.
= **1/2 I managed to
miss the original version back in ’86, but if you seen 2001’s Joyride
you’ve seen the same sort of thing done better, with more personality. The last
words uttered by the main character are “I feel nothing.” Just so.
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