Timing has a lot to do
with how and why movies leave lasting impressions. Take, for example, this unremarkable telefilm about the dangers of catching car rides from
strangers. Essentially an afterschool special with a higher level of menace (it
aired in primetime), the picture tells the paper-thin story of Julie, an
average California teenager from a good home who ignores myriad warning signs
while hitching back and forth from the suburbs to her summer job at a fast-food
joint on the beach. Julie is played by pint-sized bombshell Charlene Tilton, at
the time a TV star on Dallas, and
her costars include fell0w small-screen players Katherine Helmond, Christopher
Knight, Craig T. Nelson, and Dick Van Patten. Viewers are treated to bland
scenes of Julie debating the pros and cons of hitchhiking with her worried dad,
plus vignettes of Julie’s romantic adventures with (gasp!) an older man. Meanwhile, Julie’s unfortunate friends get rides from skeezy dudes, including a rapist/serial killer who prowls the SoCal highways in a
muscle car with darkly tinted windows. As directed by
competent action guy Ted Post, Diary of a
Teenage Hitchhiker is ordinary except when it lays on the horror-movie
clichés—every time the serial killer is about to strike, Post cuts to a montage
of detail shots as the murderer’s car revs up. And while the visual allusion to a pervert getting aroused is laughably obvious, it’s also
crudely effective.
Or at least it seemed that way when I was 10, which is where the whole business of timing enters the discussion. Watching this flick during its original broadcast, I was just old enough to grasp the storyline’s depiction of rape, and just young enough to buy into the paranoid implication that every footstep on the shoulder of a highway was a move into the path of a roaming murderer. Because of this collision between a fraught subject and a receptive viewer, the movie’s lurid mixture of cautionary-tale seriousness and exploitation-flick tackiness did a number on my young brain. Adding fuel to the pscyhological fire, the sight of Tilton and her sexy pals strutting around in skimpy shorts and tight T-shirts was enjoyable, but the cheap thrills were tainted by the subconscious knowledge that I was replicating the same male gaze as the flick’s psychotic antagonist. Anyway, you can see why these were not the easiest concepts for my preadolescent mind to process. Seen outside of its original context, Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker loses much of its mojo, coming across as an overwrought thriller with a heavy-handed social message. That said, the nasty scenes are put across with gusto, and Tilton does a passable job of capturing the developmental moment when gaining independence seems like the most important thing in the world.
Or at least it seemed that way when I was 10, which is where the whole business of timing enters the discussion. Watching this flick during its original broadcast, I was just old enough to grasp the storyline’s depiction of rape, and just young enough to buy into the paranoid implication that every footstep on the shoulder of a highway was a move into the path of a roaming murderer. Because of this collision between a fraught subject and a receptive viewer, the movie’s lurid mixture of cautionary-tale seriousness and exploitation-flick tackiness did a number on my young brain. Adding fuel to the pscyhological fire, the sight of Tilton and her sexy pals strutting around in skimpy shorts and tight T-shirts was enjoyable, but the cheap thrills were tainted by the subconscious knowledge that I was replicating the same male gaze as the flick’s psychotic antagonist. Anyway, you can see why these were not the easiest concepts for my preadolescent mind to process. Seen outside of its original context, Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker loses much of its mojo, coming across as an overwrought thriller with a heavy-handed social message. That said, the nasty scenes are put across with gusto, and Tilton does a passable job of capturing the developmental moment when gaining independence seems like the most important thing in the world.
Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker: FUNKY
How is it that Katherine Helmond has always looked old enough to be my mother, yet has also always turned me on?
ReplyDeleteFinally took a look at this after hearing a new NPR interview with Griffin Dunne, in which he characterized his sister's excitement at feeling like she was making it as an actress, getting this role 2 or 3 years prior to Poltergeist ... But watching the film it's of course incredibly disturbing since Cathy's assault & battering by the predator can't help but feel to us now like a prescient omen of the actress' sad fate ...
ReplyDeleteTo say nothing of the fact that the other girl's father's characterization of the raging desire felt by adolescents to attain their supposed "independence" by accessing their own "three thousand pound box of steel", as he puts it ; still holds that attraction 45 years on now ... In the "AmeriKKKan" nightmare culture in which in many such parts of the country, mass transit remains woefully underfunded and underdeveloped ... And if the modern kids are screwed over in both directions nowadays, by helicopter parenting & valid fear of doing what these kids did in the seventies ... Thus, as a sociologist studying the recent huge uptick in teen depression and suicide put it; they now don't go anywhere at all, "sitting on the edge of their beds" & doom-scrolling their social media garbage ... & zonked out by corrupt shrinks making a fortune from prescribing Adderall & worse to these poor kids who just needed a chance to get out & about & actually get around & socialize safely ... It almost seems "even worse" Now!!