Movieline Online

An off-putting mix of exploitation and social education, Hitchhike to Hell hides behind the skirts of public service announcements with the intent to scare kids straight about the dangers of thumbing a ride while at the same time providing copious amount of onscreen rape and murder. Director Irvin Berwick (best known for the Monster of Piedras Blancas ) had been slumming in soft-core for quite a while before putting this idea together with the help of film students from a course he was teaching at the time. And it's that very amateurishness, combined with grainy footage all shot on short-end film stock that gives the film a gutter-level shock value. Consisting of a wash-rinse-repeat scene cycle involving Howard, a nebbish dry cleaner employee, who picks up women in his delivery van and leaves their violated dead bodies by the side of the road, Hitchhike to Hell is too disturbing to be fun and too technically inept to be a lost classic (although casting the Professor from Gilli...

Although their collaborations aren't nearly as notable as Ford & Wayne or Scorsese & De Niro, the one-two punch of director Anthony Mann and Jimmy Stewart were a formidable team in the mid-50s. Paired up in a series of Westerns, starting off with Winchester '73 , the duo brought out the best in each other, with Stewart particularly enjoying a more "intense" onscreen persona than his previous romantic comedies ever allowed. The Far Country is their fourth mutual effort - and by far the most formulaic. Stewart stars as Jeff Webster, a cattleman whose last drive wound up with two men dead by his own gun. Wanted for murder, he escapes by steamer to Skagway, Alaska where the gold rush is in full force and the corrupt Judge Gannon (John McIntire) has a piece of every claim. Along with his sidekick (played by professional sidekick Walter Brennan), Jeff makes his way up to Dawson City where the community is under siege - physically and financially - by Gannon an...