Just so...so bad

Am I Missing Something?

It is not only a funny movie, but it allows a great amount of joy for anyone who watches it.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

****SPOILERS*** One of the better "Hitch-Hiker from Hell" movies that has Walter & Eve Mancini,Franco Nero & Corinne Clery,held hostage by this escaped from an institution the criminally insane hitch-hiker Adam Konitz,David Hess,in an effort to get him across the border into Mexico. You can see right away that both Walter & Eve aren't really getting along with each other and are are on the point of splitting up until Adam shows up. It was in fact Eve who, in order to get Walter off her back, insisted in her husband to pick hitch-hiker Adam up that soon backfired on both of them.With Adam, after he started getting fresh with Eve, pulling a gun on Walter who was about to brain him with a tire iron he then takes out his frustrations on the helpless Eve whom he had his eye on since he was picked up hitch-hiking. Unknown to both Walter & Eve Adam had already murdered one of his fellow escapees from the mental institution he escaped from and is being tracked down not only by the police, whom he later murdered two of them, but the two other mentally deranged escapees Oaks & Hawk, Joshua Sinclair & Carlo Puri, who he left high & dry. That by taking off with the two million dollars of stolen money from a bank they knocked off. With Adam temperately put out of commission by Oaks & Hawk, who gunned him down, he comes back from the dead, their aim wasn't on target, with a fury knocking them both off by having them drive off a cliff, after he shot them, on a car-jacked garbage truck to their deaths. Now ready for action Adam brutally rapes Eve while her helpless husband Walter, who's tied up,is forced to watch! ****SPOILERS**** Just when Adam was about to put Walter out of his misery, with a bullet to the head, he gets the surprise of his life with the just abused and raped Eve gunning him down from behind with her husband's rifle that was hidden inside their trailer. You would have thought that would be the end of the movie but there was a lot more to come. Which had nothing to do with the dead Adam but a number of wild teenage bikers who drove Walter and Eve's trailer off the road leaving the two for dead. It's then that Walter, who never had any use for his wife Eve anyway, finally freed himself from her as well as freed the stolen two million dollars, by Adam, all for himself to spend.

A European couple on a long road trip in California picks up a hitch-hiker who turns out to be a psycho. This low-budget thriller looks and sounds cheesy. It appears that Nero and Clery, playing a bickering couple in a troubled marriage, are dubbed, but it could just be bad acting. In fact, the acting is uniformly bad, including Hess in a wildly over-the-top performance as the psycho hitcher. The script looks like it was probably written in about an hour. The main characters are strictly one-dimensional while the secondary characters are zero-dimensional. Clery, of "The Story of O" fame, has no qualms about disrobing for her craft. What a dedicated actress!

No, they don't do movies like this anymore. A tough one about self-hatred, mayhem and self- destruction: Franco Nero as a down-&-out reporter, Corinne Clery as his sexy, completely hollow spouse, plus David Hess doing his usual good- humored-and-mean-as-hell thing. "Autostop Rosso Sangue" is sleazy, sexist, ultra-violent, but not without some unforgettable moments: The naked Clery in front of a trailer holding a huge rifle in the middle of the night is like a hastily written, edgy but brilliant poem found in a tattered paperback left in a cheap motel. For a few short hours in his life, Pasquale Festa Campanile, creator of some of the worst Euro comedies ever, turned into a poète maudit of the most cynical kind. This is the kind of grindhouse cinema nobody can embrace with seventies nostalgia: mature, brutal, knowing, never "cool", always cold, gripping and utterly nihilistic. Anything else you would ask for?

Everybody in this movie is strictly out for themselves, which makes the double dealing all the more believable. You are never quite sure who to root for. As soon as one bad guy is disposed of, another appears to take their place. Along the way there is plenty of sexual tension, fistfights, car crashes, shootings, and various other entertainment for exploitation fans. "Hitch-Hike" has just enough action and plot twists to offset the sub-par acting. As an added bonus, Ennio Morricone, delivers a very good score, somewhat reminiscent of the "Dollar" spaghetti westerns. This all adds up to a highly recommended exploitation film. - MERK