Hitch Hike

In this 1977 thriller, Franco Nero and Corinne Clery play Walter and Eve Mancini, an unhappily married Italian couple on a camping road trip in California who pick up a hitchhiker named Adam Konitz (David Hess)—a man who turns out to be a wanted bank robber and psychotic killer. Konitz forces the Mancinis to drive him to Mexico at gunpoint; tries to tempt Walter—an Italian journalist going to seed as a bitter alcoholic—to write Konitz's story as a true crime thriller; and molests Eve in front of Walter to give the book "a little sex." But then Konitz's betrayed partners in crime come looking for revenge. Director Pasquale Festa Campanile pulls off some unexpected twists along the way but the script is nonsensical at times and the film's notoriety mostly stems from its sleazy and cynical nature and unrepentant streak of misogyny, which is extreme even for the genre of giallo-influenced Italian crime film. The treatment of Clery, who is sexually assaulted by the men in the film (including her husband), is downright brutal, and the film itself is viciously exploitative in the way it constantly shows her on naked display and under sexual threat. A brutal, unpleasant film with little to recommend it—aside from a characteristically good score by Oscar winner Ennio Morricone—to general audiences, Hitch Hike is presented with a retrospective featurette and a booklet. Not a necessary purchase. (S. Axmaker)