hitchhike to hell

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 Gilligan's Island as the lead detective is good for some pop culture street cred). It's a real oddity that would have fit perfectly as part of Arrow's American Horror Project series, which seems to have been abandoned in favor of individual releases such as this.

Watching the film unprepared is a big mistake. In fact, I highly recommend watching the extras first this time around to get a better sense of the film's origins. Stephen Thrower provides 30-minutes of background on Berwick and the many stages of his career, while Road to Nowhere: Hitchhiking Culture Goes to Hell is a comprehensive look at the real-world and cinematic implications of hitchhiking through the years. The main feature itself is transferred from a new 2K restoration that looks colorfully grimy with both a 1.33 and 1.78 version to choose from. Additional extras include a trailer and collector's booklet.