The Hitcher (1986)

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A blonde woman in a pink cardigan sits with her eyes half closed in a car’s front seat while a dark-haired man reaches past her for the steering wheel.

This one just baffled me. Maybe it’s the color balance of the films shot in the desert in the 80’s, but I’m such an immediate sucker. It’s like Paris, TX - beautiful twilight and sunset shots, aspect-ratios that complement the endless horizon, and some asshole kid who is so afraid of shooting someone that he lets Jennifer Jason Leigh get torn in half by a freight truck like she’s a tow hitch.

Look, I don’t watch horror films for the character development, I just expect there to be some from someone you have classified as your protagonist. For instance - if you picked up someone who was hitchhiking and they (in this order):

Threatened to kill you with a switchblade until you pushed them out of the car
Then was picked up by another family, taunted you, then slaughtered said family
Tried to kill you by exploding a gas station while you were covered in gasoline
Framed you for murdering everyone in a police station

… you’d probably find yourself having a hard time not pulling the trigger, right?

Some pluses, though. They had a vehicle budget that certainly wasn’t as big as The Blues Brothers’, but it was sizable. The antagonist played by Rutger Hauer (“Like tears in rain”, that guy) was phenomenal despite some clear questions about plot holes in the writing room. Love interests weren’t forced where I thought they might be which, to be honest, is high praise for 80’s horror.

Score: C