Another odd exploitation movie from married
filmmakers Beverly and Ferd Sebastian, The
Hitchhikers mixes the distasteful little-girl-lost subgenre with the
equally tawdry criminal-cult subgenre. Oh, and the movie also features an
extended scene of a gruesome illegal abortion. On some level, perhaps the
Sebastians thought they were engaging with serious social issues, and, indeed,
some scenes in The Hitchhikers feel
sincere. Yet the movie also contains catfights, topless shots, and vignettes of
sexy girls standing on the sides of country roads and flashing their panties to
get the attention of male drivers. Only the most sophisticated filmmakers can
get away with blending exploitation-flick sensationalism with social-drama
heaviosity, and the Sebastians have never been accused of demonstrating
sophistication. The movie starts in the usual way, with a pretty young girl
leaving home because some boy got her in trouble. Maggie (Misty Rowe) has the
requisite ugly encounter with a trucker when a dude plies her with food and
transportation before demanding sex and raping her when she refuses.
Eventually, Maggie falls in with a group of hippies who reside in a ghost
town—deliberate shades of the Manson family—and participates in their scheme of
robbing men gullible enough to stop their cars when girls show a little skin.
Painfully slow and thematically void, The
Hitchhikers nearly holds the viewer’s attention simply because it seems as
if the plot threads might eventually converge in an interesting way, but of
course they never do.
The
Hitchhikers: LAME
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