The Hitcher, a tribute to a friend.

If you didn't know that The Hitcher was a jar submission by Mr Thomas Rosie, it wouldn't have been hard to guess. It shares a lot with his first jar choice, The Terminator: both see a seemingly unstoppable killer chasing down a helpless victim who has no idea why they are being targeted, both have a fair bit of violence, and both, like Tom, are products of the mid-80's. The similarities make even more sense when you realise that Rutger Hauer, who plays the hitcher in this film, previously played an unstoppable cyborg in Blade Runner. This is all evidentiary that this was Tom's submission, but the most vital clue? The titular Hitcher is a master level Troll.

When I first met Mr Rosie, he was introduced as Tom the cunt. Well I bet Jim Halsey, played by C Thomas Howell, thinks that the hitchhiker he picked up, who calls himself John Ryder, is a bit of a cunt too. He refuses to answer when asked where he's headed and displays some ominously threatening behaviour. When asked to get out the car John opens the door as if he's about to oblige, but then pauses and flicks away his half smoked cigarette. Soon the threat of danger turns real when John pulls a blade on Jim. Sure he might seem like a cunt, but it's clear to me that John has just found his own way of entertaining himself - he's just playing games. When stopped at a police checkpoint and the officer assumes Jim and John are gay lovers upon seeing John's hand on Jim's thigh, John simply blows the officer a kiss. John is just totally trolling the police officer and Jim. Even his name, John Ryder, is clearly trolling - Ryder, as in someone who hitches rides in cars.

When Jim finally manages to throw John from the moving car, he thinks his woes are over, but this game of Cat and Mouse has only just begun. If John is a cat though, he's clearly already eaten. Instead of devouring his prey at the many opportunities he has, he plays a game of catch and release, toying with his prey just because he can, even assisting him at times in order to apparently level the playing field. This too is the ultimate goal of any good internet troll - you never want to shut down a good trolling interaction when you've found someone fun to wind up - the longer you can drag out that interaction the more you can frustrate your victim. When Jim has a face to face confrontation with John, his only real question is "Why are you doing this?" John teases "Figure it out," in reply. An internet troll, like John has no real motive for what they do beyond their own enjoyment: there is no profit to be made ; there is no political agenda; there is no point of pride or principal - well maybe a little pride in how far they can take it.

There's a lot more to love about this movie beyond the trolling of course. The cast is great with Rutger Hauer clearly stealing the show in one of his most iconic roles, but C Thomas Howell makes a compelling enough lead showing his desperation and exasperation with a rubber face that reminded me of Bruce Campbell in The Evil Dead 2. Then of course there's Jennifer Jason Leigh, effortlessly elevating what feels written to be a generic box-ticking love interest. She's a feisty, smart girl-next-door and manages to invest the viewer enough that they really feel it when it comes to the crunch. Jennifer Jason Leigh is a fantastic actress with an impressively sustained career but she cemented her place as one of my favourite actresses as the hilariously vile Daisy Donahue in Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful 8. Filling out the cast is a whole host of actors who have the most generic looking Texas Cop faces ever put to screen.

There's something about the desert setting that always appeals to me too. It invokes the wildness of a Western and creates an environment so empty and barren that if feels hopeless. The desert is a place of extremes and the characters in films with desert settings often too find themselves going to extreme lengths, often tapping into som animalistic behaviour. The Mad Max movies, No Country For Old Men (2007) and the 'Crime of Passion' segment of Wild Tales (2009), come to mind but there's a ton of movies in the exact same vein as The Hitcher including Stephen Spielberg's first real movie, Duel (1971), the Paul Walker movie, Joy Ride (2001), and the new Russell Crowe film, Unhinged (2020). Then of course the was an inevitable sequel that nobody knowsabout, The Hitcher 2: I've Been Waiting (2003) and a remake, The Hitcher (2007) starring Sean Bean, neither of which I've seen, but it strikes me as very odd to cast Sean Bean someone famous for dying in everything he appears in as someone who supposed to seem unkillable.

I've never much been a big fan of horror films. Often the supernatural elements seem more ridiculous than scary to me, but since I was a kid there were always 2 horror films that worked for me. This nasty little film was one of them and the other was Misery (1990). Neither film is supernatural, instead giving us a more real, human threat than ghosts, demons or zombies. Each film presents a psychological torture as much as a brutal physical one and each have inexplicably relentless villains who exact their torment with a sense of glee and satisfaction.

The Hitcher had John Ryder. Misery had Annie Wilkes. We have Tom Rosie.

4 Thomas Rosies out of 5.