Leofwine_draca HITCH-HIKE is a moralistic Italian crime thriller with a sleazy feel that comes from the presence in the cast of David Hess, playing up to his usual sadistic LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT persona. He plays a volatile hitch-hiker who is picked up by bickering couple Franco Nero and Corinne Clery and subsequently holds them hostage on a lengthy road trip. The film has much in common with Mario Bava's RABID DOGS but is nowhere near as good, because the story is quite depressing and the incidents depicted are more unpleasant than not. Thee's a great deal of beating and humiliation, with nudity and rape the order of the day here. Saying that, the direction is slick and there's plenty of suspense too, amid the broken characters and outbursts of sadism. I found the big twist ending to be somewhat predictable given the film's level of nihilism as a whole.

kapelusznik18 ****SPOILERS*** One of the better "Hitch-Hiker from Hell" movies that has Walter & Eve Mancini,Franco Nero & Corinne Clery,held hostage by this escaped from an institution the criminally insane hitch-hiker Adam Konitz,David Hess,in an effort to get him across the border into Mexico. You can see right away that both Walter & Eve aren't really getting along with each other and are are on the point of splitting up until Adam shows up. It was in fact Eve who, in order to get Walter off her back, insisted in her husband to pick hitch-hiker Adam up that soon backfired on both of them.With Adam, after he started getting fresh with Eve, pulling a gun on Walter who was about to brain him with a tire iron he then takes out his frustrations on the helpless Eve whom he had his eye on since he was picked up hitch-hiking. Unknown to both Walter & Eve Adam had already murdered one of his fellow escapees from the mental institution he escaped from and is being tracked down not only by the police, whom he later murdered two of them, but the two other mentally deranged escapees Oaks & Hawk, Joshua Sinclair & Carlo Puri, who he left high & dry. That by taking off with the two million dollars of stolen money from a bank they knocked off. With Adam temperately put out of commission by Oaks & Hawk, who gunned him down, he comes back from the dead, their aim wasn't on target, with a fury knocking them both off by having them drive off a cliff, after he shot them, on a car-jacked garbage truck to their deaths. Now ready for action Adam brutally rapes Eve while her helpless husband Walter, who's tied up,is forced to watch! ****SPOILERS**** Just when Adam was about to put Walter out of his misery, with a bullet to the head, he gets the surprise of his life with the just abused and raped Eve gunning him down from behind with her husband's rifle that was hidden inside their trailer. You would have thought that would be the end of the movie but there was a lot more to come. Which had nothing to do with the dead Adam but a number of wild teenage bikers who drove Walter and Eve's trailer off the road leaving the two for dead. It's then that Walter, who never had any use for his wife Eve anyway, finally freed himself from her as well as freed the stolen two million dollars, by Adam, all for himself to spend.

EVOL666 David Hess is at it again as another rapist-psycho in the exploitation "road-thriller", HITCH-HIKE. An Italian film shot to look as though it was filmed in the desert of the U.S. south-west, HITCH-HIKE is an often tense and entertaining film, that despite a good bit of relatively graphic violence, rape, and other "strong" content, never really seems to cross the line into blatantly sleazy exploit territory. An exploit film definitely - but one with a bit more substance than most...Playing a role much like the ones he's portrayed in LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, and HOUSE AT THE EDGE OF THE PARK - Hess puts on a powerful performance as a bank robber picked up by a drunk reporter and his extremely tolerant wife - the daughter of a publishing mogul. Hess is one of three who escaped the robbery unscathed, and is on the run and looking for safe-passage to Mexico to spend his new-found two million dollars. Along the way, Hess and company have run-in's with cops, the other remaining bank robbers, and other "obstacles" until the "shocking" finale...HITCH-HIKE will be a winner amongst 70's exploit fans, and also fans of Hess's other over-the-top performances. Franco Nero as the rough-and-tumble alcoholic reporter and Corinne Clery as his tolerant wife shine very much as well (especially Clery, who is gorgeous and spends a good bit of the film in various degrees of undress...). The storyline is pretty straight-forward, but has a "free-form" feel to it that allows for several twists and strange situations. My only real complaint is that the film feels about twenty minutes too long, as if some of the scenes towards the end could have been trimmed a bit - but the "downbeat" ending is worth it. Definitely worth a look to exploit and Hess fans...8.5/10

Woodyanders "Hitchhike" is a remarkably harsh and startling example of the back-roads killer thriller genre. It's a truly harrowing homicidal hitchhiker opus with a stand-out psycho perf by the ever-intense David Hess as a dangerous highway bandit who forces both Franco Nero and Corrine Clery as a bickering unhappily married couple to give him a ride. Pretty soon everyone in the cramped confined car are pushing each other's buttons. Nero especially falls prey to Hess' toxic influence; he slowly, but surely starts tapping into his heretofore repressed wild animal side as Hess helps himself to Nero's gorgeous wife (Clerry deserves special props for her very brave and unabashedly open performance). Things reach a full boil as the film progresses, leading to a truly jolting conclusion which I will not reveal. Trust me; this one is a true shocker with some nice'n'nasty nihilistic surprises and an unsparingly rough tone. It's expertly directed by Pasquale Festa Companile, with uniformly excellent acting from the whole cast (Hess in particular is wonderfully repulsive in his finest screen scumbag role to date), a tasty Ennio Morricone score, and several jarring outbursts of blood-curdlingly brutal violence, this unsung gem is well worth picking up. It's done in that slick'n'sleazy style that's a true marvelous hallmark of 70's Italian exploitation cinema. It even comes complete with a disturbingly dark, yet provocative point about human nature: We all have a latent capacity for extreme evil; all we need is the right negative stimulus to activate it. My only gripe is this horrendously sappy hippie folk tune that occasionally plays on the soundtrack; it's a simply irritating ditty that hurts the pic more than helps it. That minor criticism aside, this one overall rates as a real hair-raising winner.