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 Mark travels the "Virginia Beach coastline" and "picks up hitchhiking women in
his camper". He makes them assume the roll of his mother and if they don't, he
kills them. Shriek Show refers to this one as a "suspense classic". 1989, 90 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
With another release of another long and rightfully neglected Italian horror
movie, Shriek Show raises this simple yet perplexing question: How did they
decide to package Hitcher In The Dark as part of "The Giallo Collection"
instead of "The Umberto Lenzi Collection"? Its plot may make you think at
first glance that this might be properly put in their Giallo Collection along
with stuff like My Dear Killer and Spasmo (also from Lenzi) what with its tale
of a rich pud cruising around the Virginia coast picking up ugly eighties girls
and remaking them to look like his ugly Russian mother, but while the story
line may scream "artless Psycho rip-off in an RV", the credits tell a different
story and make a good case for this being put in "The Umberto Lenzi Collection"
along side such landmarks of lameness as Black Demons. Besides sharing Umberto
as the director, both movies feature the same writing team of Umberto and Olga
Pehar! That's right! This is the same Olga Pehar who helped pen such scripts
(probably with a crayon) as Black Demons and um, Black Demons, as well as, uh
well, I seem to recall her work on Black Demons. Okay, I've got it now. She
also worked on a script called Karate Warrior 3 with a little somebody called
Dardano Sacchetti. We all know that Dardano penned every single Italian horror
movie during that whole decade (see for example Zombie, Cannibal Apocalypse,
and House By The Cemetery, but don't see for example Manhattan Baby , The Church and A Blade In The Dark). The clincher though that this one's home is
along side Black Demons (well, if you're not going to put the disc in the
microwave to watch it spark all kinds of pretty colors) is the presence of
forty watt mega star Joe Balogh.  Joe's skinny non-presence was last seen jamming to his favorite Macumba tunes
in an old slave burial ground down in Brazil or somewhere where he was intent
on raising a gaggle of Black Demons! Joe, whose chief talent seems to be his
slight resemblance to the oldest son on ABC's sitcom Mr. Belvedere, brings
everything from Black Demons (feathered hair, scrawny physical appearance,
hideous polo shirts) and then some (oversized mirrored sunglasses, gigantic
motor home, hilarious potty mouth) to his role as hotel heir Mark Glazer. (I'm
assuming that Umberto couldn't get permission to name Joe's character Mark Days
Inn or Mark Embassy Suites because of the controversial subject matter, but I
think we can all assume that Joe's character is probably based on one of those
two families.) Besides his lack of fashion sense and his creepy effeminate
bearing, Mark's problems adjusting to his parents' breakup (Dad is too busy
with work and good looking mistresses while Mom is too busy being old and ugly
and going back to Russia) have led him straight into Norman Bates territory.
Mark's gimmick is to drive around in an enormous, very conspicuous, and hard to
park motor home, pick up gals and make them pretend to be his mommy. (The movie said the RV was an 88 Chieftain and for those of you that
want a piece of this movie to park in your very own drive way, I've seen
where northwest Indiana's largest RV dealer is willing to let one go for
$16,500. You get a microwave, generator, AC and an awning! It also holds up
to a half dozen corpses of hapless hitchhiker skanks, I mean, it sleeps six.)
If the ladies don't really "feel
the part" they get stabbed with scissors and dumped in alligator infested
swamps. While it sounds like Umberto and Olga have a great idea on their hands here since no
one minds watching hoochies that can't compare to your mother getting fed to
gators, the movie really skimps on that aspect of Joe's character and we only
get one warm-up kill before he spends ninety minutes harassing Josie Bissett
into wearing a really atrocious wig.  Once the first kill is out of the way, setting up Mark's anger management
problem (He slams on the brakes and causes his passenger to whack her head on
the dashboard after she asks him if his Russian mom is a spy or ballerina
because he doesn't like when people say bad things about Daniska!) we find Mark
wondering around a camp ground where people are gathered around a guy with a
boom box and Josie is dancing to what sounds like either elevator music or
Italian horror movie pop music (I can never tell the difference). Mark decides
that he needs to unwind after a tough day of disposing corpses in the swamps
and heads into the bar where he refuses to take off his really big mirrored
sunglasses and also refuses to talk to some chicks that are hitting on him,
prompting one of the two great lines from this movie: "Who do you think you
are? Mickey Rourke?" The girls leave in a huff, while I was left to wonder
just who in the hell Mickey Rourke was. About this time, Josie and her
boyfriend Kevin get into a fight. He gets himself slapped and she walks out on
him. Later on, Mark is cruising around in his RV and she asks him for a lift to
the bus station. He drugs her and takes her captive and proceeds to give her
an extreme make over. This involves him looking at an 8x10 of his mommy - a
middle-aged hag with a helmet haircut - and chopping Josie's bottle blonde hair
off, coloring it and sculpting it into a wig that's nastier than you can
imagine. I assume that since that RV cost about $16,500 (if you're smart
enough to go through northwest Indiana's largest RV dealer), they had to make
this wig from Umberto's back hair or something. Mark shows his love for his
mother through her, the way most of us would, by raping her, taking dirty
pictures of her while she was passed out and making her model a red dress that
I don't think even people in the eighties would have worn unless they had a
crazed maniac with a mother fixation waving a switch blade in their face and
shouting "slut!" and "whore!" at them repeatedly.  Josie isn't completely out of luck though, because her ex-boyfriend is soon on
the case and searching for her. (I'm assuming it's so that he can tell her that
she can't dump him, because he's dumping her! Then he can save some face with
the guys.) How does Kevin get put on the trail that's she been kidnapped by
some sissy in a camper? Mark turns out to be one of your less cunning serial
killer/rapists because even though he parks his RV in out of the way places
where no one will ever find them, he manages to pick the out of the way place
next to the Shell station with the pay phone. He also manages to let Josie
escape a couple of times. Don't think he didn't learn his lesson though that
one time when she hijacked his rig while he was out in the rain whining about
his impotence and she went and got the RV stuck in the mud and blew out the fan
belt! So, Josie manages to call her sister and tell her that she's been
kidnapped. Kevin is brought in to blow the case wide open and he does this
with one of those half-assed investigations you always see in these kind of
movies - you know the type - Kevin wanders around until he runs into people
that just happen to have the information he needs. He gets the word from a
couple of bikers that she was last seen getting into a motor home, but then the
biker adds that he couldn't' swear to it because he had just taken a hit of acid
when he thought he saw her. No matter though, because Kevin ratchets up his
investigation by keeping an eye on every RV he sees and gets himself beat up by
some dude after Kevin decides to make an impromptu search of the dude's RV.
Finally, he gets his big break at the local water park where he was looking for
leads at a wet T-shirt contest. (It's fun for the whole family at this place
because you can see little kids in the background!) Kevin runs into a guy who is trying to sell Josie's headphones that he stole
from the RV while Mark was out getting a new fan belt. This guy shows Kevin
where the RV is parked and the next thing you know Kevin has solved the case!
And by solving the case, I mean that Kevin gets himself captured by the much
smaller and more pansy-esque Mark and gets his mouth sliced, the side of his
head shot, and the word "pig" carved into his chest. He also closes the case
by ending up dead inside a welded shut car trunk at the local junkyard. Josie
ends up inside a trunk, too, but you never believe for one second that she's
dead and are just waiting for the completely predictable finale. I suppose the
selling point of this movie now is that Josie Bissett is in this. She
apparently was in something called Melrose Place, which I have never heard of,
but sounds like a spin-off of Beverly Hills 90210. (Can you imagine?) She's
got this white trash pig face (maybe that's why Mark was carving "pig" into
Kevin's chest) and the wig she wears throughout only exacerbates her lack of
appeal. The movie is poorly done in typical Lenzi fashion with lots of false
suspense (How many times is Mark going to be stopped by the cops?) and a total
lack of believability in both the performances of Mark, Kevin, and Josie as
well as the script that provides us with such gems as when the cops see the
wound left on Mark from where Josie stabbed him with a fork and asks what
happened to him and he says, "I scratched myself. I was cleaning my spear."
Your spear? What? Right after you got back from the big woolly mammoth hunt? Umberto's
likewise laughable attempts to infuse Mark's character with deep psychological
motivations for his behavior rings just as false. You hate your dad and miss
your mother, so you're out raping women that you make up to be her? And you
have a drinking problem? And you torture guys while their girlfriends watch?
And you know how to replace a fan belt on a rented RV? And you have a spear?
This is an exercise in mounting tedium and you quickly tire of watching him
yell at Josie inside the RV and watching her half-witted escape attempts.
Shriek Show once again features an interview with the clearly delusional Lenzi
where you can hear him complain about Josie's refusal to do nude scenes, praise
Joe Balogh's work, and claim that this movie would have been a masterpiece if
the producer hadn't made him tack on the ending where Josie gets her revenge.
It might have been a masterpiece if the producer hadn't made you tack on
anything after the opening credits, Umberto, but that's about it. Now, I have
some spears to clean, so if you need me, I'll be in my RV (slightly used, but
with awning and microwave).
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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