The Hitcher

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night? So asked Kerouac, the original hitchhiker, before 1986 cult horror The Hitcher gave the thumb-wielding freeloaders a bad name. In this amped-up retread, the unfeasibly gormless heroic twosome seem to have wandered off an Abercrombie and Fitch photo shoot into Pointless Horror Remake Land: a strange and dangerous terrain somewhere west of New Mexico, populated entirely by nubile twenty-somethings, witless law-enforcers and superhuman psychopaths. Stars Bush and Knighton fill their roles – and their tank tops – adequately enough, while Sean Bean villains it up for the zillionth time in the Rutger Hauer role, tormenting said dimwits with a combination of astounding teleportation, a limitless – yet extremely compact – weapons cache and some bad-guy regulation stubble. It's slickly directed, but the original's suggestive ambiguity is gone, replaced with mean-spirited bloodiness and lots of jolting revs on the soundtrack. A definite thumbs-down. [Laura Smith]