Dis­cov­er the sleazy cau­tion­ary tale of this hitch­hik­ing thriller

“This is where they dumped me off, after all kinds of lec­tures and warn­ings.” So com­plains Pam (Beth Reis), a teenaged hitch­hik­er who has just had a run in with Cap­tain JW Shaw (Rus­sell John­son) and Lt Davis (Randy Echols) of the Cres­cent City police depart­ment. This city in Del Norte Coun­ty, Cal­i­for­nia is ​“the hub of high­ways to every­where,” and the police are alarmed by a recent spate of rapes and mur­ders per­pe­trat­ed upon young women trav­el­ling through, and so inter­cept­ed Pam to give her a les­son in the dan­gers of hitchhiking.

She should have lis­tened, because the per­son to whom she is address­ing these words is Howard Mar­tin (Robert Grib­bin), whose home­spun cour­tesy and aw-shucks naïveté con­ceal a psy­cho­path­ic com­pul­sion to kill. The ride that Pam accepts in Howard’s red van will be her last.

Hitch Hike to Hell is itself a pecu­liar blend of ser­i­al kill thrills and ​“lec­tures and warn­ings”. Right from the open­ing, the sound of a woman say­ing ​“No! no!” and scream­ing (her naked body briefly glimpsed being dumped on the ground) is replaced by the coun­try strains of the tit­u­lar song whose lyrics (“There’s dan­ger on the road, dan­ger on the road, when you go thumb­ing a ride”) come with a cer­tain didac­ti­cism. The irony here is that the song’s les­son (“Don’t leave your fam­i­ly / The friends who care for you / Think twice, girl, before you go”) offer a prin­ci­ple to which Howard him­self is ful­ly subscribed.

Still haunt­ed by the depar­ture of his sis­ter Judy six years ear­li­er, and the betray­al that it rep­re­sent­ed to his beloved moth­er (Dorothy Ben­nett), Har­ry attacks only run­aways – the ones who have left their fam­i­lies and speak ill of their moth­ers – even call­ing each of them Judy as he ​‘pun­ish­es’ their per­ceived ingrat­i­tude and treach­ery, while he notably leaves untouched the one young girl he picks up who express­ly loves her moth­er (“She’s the great­est girl in the world”) and is just look­ing for a lift across town rather than leav­ing home.

Those around slow, bespec­ta­cled Harold – like his moth­er, or his employ­er Mr Bald­win (John Har­mon) at the clean­ing com­pa­ny for which Howard deliv­ers clothes – have noticed that he has been act­ing strange­ly these last few weeks, what with his dazed state, his unchar­ac­ter­is­tic impunc­tu­al­i­ty, his black­outs, his loss of appetite and his night­mares. Nobody, how­ev­er, even sus­pects that this nice, respect­ful man­child could hurt a fly.

Even Howard him­self has no idea, for he enters a sort of fugue state when he kills, with only the most frag­men­tary rec­ol­lec­tion after­wards of what he has done. So as we fol­low his ser­i­al assaults, his split iden­ti­ty enables him all at once to be a nervy Nor­man Bates fig­ure whose moth­er-lov­ing fix­a­tions (and final man­ic to-cam­era scene) nat­u­ral­ly con­jure Alfred Hitchcock’s Psy­cho, and to be an Eight­ies slash­er whose only mask is his own amnesia.

We view­ers are also left con­flict­ed and split: for we take in the film’s po-faced moral­is­ing (“Seems there are delin­quent par­ents as well as delin­quent chil­dren,” com­ments Cap­tain Shaw grave­ly), which gives Hitch Hike to Hell the char­ac­ter of an ABC After­school Spe­cial; yet at the same time, the film’s exploita­tion title and stran­glings-by-num­bers prime us to want to see the next kill, and the next.

The mur­der scenes them­selves are rel­a­tive­ly non-graph­ic, but as Howard’s range of tar­gets broad­ens from young women to a gay man (Don Lewis) and ulti­mate­ly to an 11-year-old girl (Sheryl Lynn), our own errant desires as view­ers are stretched and test­ed. For as long as his vic­tims express a desire to get away from their moth­ers, Howard is per­haps less dis­crim­i­nat­ing than we are, and from that dif­fer­ence, dis­com­fort emerges, as ​‘genre-appro­pri­ate’ vic­tims are replaced with others.

Direc­tor Irvin Berwick’s film­mak­ing con­nec­tions went all the way back to the old con­tract days at Colum­bia Stu­dios in the For­ties (when he worked reg­u­lar­ly under B‑movie mae­stro William Cas­tle), and then at Uni­ver­sal-Inter­na­tion­al in much of the ​’50s. In 1958 he helped set up inde­pen­dent pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny Van­wick Pic­tures, through which he direct­ed his first pic­ture, The Mon­ster of Piedras Blan­cas, a cheap Crea­ture from the Black Lagoon rip-off with a mon­ster cos­tume lit­er­al­ly pieced togeth­er from oth­er films’ dis­card­ed mon­ster costumes.

Hitch Hike to Hell was the last film he direct­ed before going on to teach film­mak­ing at UCLA. If we are being hon­est, the direc­tion here is unflashy and worka­day, even pedes­tri­an, and much of the dia­logue in the screen­play from John Buck­ley (with whom Berwick had pre­vi­ous­ly col­lab­o­rat­ed on 1979’s Mal­ibu High) comes across as over-earnest and stilt­ed. Nonethe­less, like its anti­hero, it con­ceals beneath its bland­ly whole­some exte­ri­or some shock­ing transgressions.

Hitch Hike to Hell is avail­able now on Blu-ray by Arrow Films in a brand new 2K restora­tion from the orig­i­nal film elements.