Hitcher 2, The (2003)
Cast: C. Thomas Howell, Kari Wuhrer, Jake Busey
Director: Louis Morneau
Synopsis: 17 years on, "the Hitcher" is back up to his old murderous tricks again!
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

The first Hitcher film from the mid 80’s came at a time when the horror cycle was going through difficult times as the slasher cycle was all but dead and zombie and possession films were yesterday’s news. The latest thing on the horror block was the “nightmare within reality within a nightmare” world that had been introduced to us in Wes Craven’s screamer Nightmare on Elm Street. All of a sudden every second horror movie would have a touch of the same “dream reality” merging stuff going on and plots became elasticised, elongated and stretched to the very limits of credibility – even for horror films.

The Hitcher arrived as a supernatural, bogeyman version of Steven Spielberg’s outstanding road thriller Duel and managed to catch on in a big way on the video circuit where it has made quite a name for itself over the years. The film had style, was well acted but most of all had a memorably charismatic performance by Hauer as the Hitchhiking bogeyman even if the plot was beyond threadbare and bereft of even a shred of plausibility. Though there are sequences in the Hitcher that were stylishly mounted and the film was entertaining and gripping on the whole – it had a plot that was pure fantasy and made little effort at making any sense - A classic case of style over substance, even if it was fairly palatable.

The new Hitcher film arrives 17 years later with C. Thomas Howell reprising his role as Jim Halsey, the young man who had been terrorized by a ghostly Hitcher who is now a very jittery police officer drifting dangerously close to the edge. In the dramatic we are shown that Jim Halsey is dangerously trigger happy and he has to be relieved of his duties to sort out his problems. His shapely girlfriend Kari Wuhrer persuades him to go back to confront his demons from the past and reluctantly he agrees. The fun and games begin when a feisty Wuhrer forces Halsey to pick up a Hitcher in the form of Jake Busey and very soon the clock is turned back 17 years and the game is on against a new superhuman, phantom, psycho hitcher who is at least as maniacal as his predecessor if not half as charming or witty.

After Halsey is dumped, Wuhrer has to throw herself headlong into a game of survival against the sadistic Busey who toys with his prey by slaughtering various innocents along the way and ingeniously and effortlessly pinning the blame on Ms. Wuhrer who keeps getting caught in terribly incriminating positions over and over again….”You’ve gotta belive it wasn’t me!” she squeals time and again with a smoking gun in one hand, a blood stained dagger in the other hand and freshly killed corpses littered all over the place. The race is on and so is the deadly game of cat and mouse – will “farm girl” Kari Wuhrer get the better of the grinning blonde menace or will he succeed in framing her for the murder of an entire police force and more.

The action flows thick and fast and is slickly presented with enough nastiness and gore to keep gore hounds sniffing for more. The film looks great with all those fancy tinted lenses being used to good effect and Kari Wuhrer is in top form as girl in peril turned ass-kicker. Jake Busey doesn’t have half the charm that Rutger Hauer packed into his performance and looks like a menacing hick rather than a smooth, fast talking phantom psycho killer. Then of course the greatest flaw the film suffers from is a total disdain for even the slightest plausibility.

If the first Hitcher seemed outlandish beyond the realms of sanity, this one really does take the cake for having more plot holes than a good Swiss cheese and rapidly runs out of steam running on empty as it were. There is much spectacular action and Kari Wuhrer is easy on the eyes yet really the film is jut too downright silly and there are no explanations and no attempts at logic – one just has to accept the events of both movies as surreal, nightmarish dreams which have no connection with reality. Hitcher 2 is violent, stylish, even entertaining but ultimately a totally empty, very silly and rather pointless film.