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Eric Red's screenplay, with its intimations of Borges, has The Doors for inspiration ("If you give this man a ride, sweet family will die"), Robert Harmon keys it to Hitchcock, starting on Marion Crane's drive to the Bates Motel. The El Paso desert at dusk and abruptly rain-soaked, just the void for the boy half-asleep at the wheel (C. Thomas Howell) and the strapping stranger with his thumb up (Rutger Hauer). The hitchhiker puts a knife to the driver's neck and starts seeping into him, he's ejected but proceeds to materialize in station wagons, roadside diners, and police stations. Jeux de route, trails of corpses, asphalt that bursts into flames. "How do you like Shitsville?" The monstrous comedy of picking up the devil in order to stay awake, the endless nightmare of trying to outrun him. Harmon pares down his vistas to this oneiric dread, the Ruscha gas station that rattles under looming skies and the horizon distorted by battered earth and zigzagging cars. (Losey's Figures in a Landscape is briefly cited with a police helicopter brought down by the nemesis' gun.) Chief amid its cunning cruelties is the yearning waitress out of The Petrified Forest (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who alone believes the runt's tale of terror and is for her trouble suspended between motorized behemoths. The cat and the mouse who might in the end be doppelgängers, the very foul pas de deux lubricated with spit and consummated with bullets. "There's something strange between you two. I don't know what it is, I don't want to know." Ulmer's Detour is a fundamental antecedent, Lynch's Blue Velvet is fascinatingly concurrent. With Jeffrey DeMunn, John M. Jackson, Billy Green Bush, Jack Thibeau, and Armin Shimerman.
--- Fernando F. Croce |