The Hitchhikers

I found this movie to be very entertaining. It's light hearted and it rolls along at a good pace. Perfect for an afternoon viewing. Maybe not for the younger viewer though as there is quite a lot of partial nudity and teasing camera work. The characters are likeable even though they are crooks and the acting, although not challenging is more than adequate.It's very much a 70's road movie and a good example at that.

THE HITCHHIKERS stars Misty Rowe as Maggie, who, upon discovering that she's pregnant, goes on an odyssey of sorts on the open road. This is a rough journey for Maggie, who is both robbed and sexually assaulted along the way.

This all leads to a desert ghost town, where Maggie is taken by a man named Benson (Norman Klar). She's introduced to women who work with Benson in his criminal enterprise, involving the movie's title. These folks are sort of a non-homicidal Manson Family, whose approach to larceny is certainly novel. Maggie joins in on the felonious fun.

Ms. Rowe is good in her rather naive, debut role, making the best of this early 1970's drive-in fodder...

OK, this movie isn't very good--but it IS the early 1970's. It has the hippies, the free love, the short-shorts, and not a bra in sight. It has the groovy, pleasantly awful early 70's folk-rock music. It is meandering, amoral, and ultimately completely pointless. It's a road movie that doesn't really go anywhere. Like many movies of the time it tried to exploit the infamy of the Manson family, but its anti-hero "Benson" is not nearly as crazy or vicious as the real-life Manson, and his "family" consists of only a few under-dressed women whom he uses to hold up horny male motorists, all to finance his evil master plan of buying a broken-down school bus. Misty Rowe stars as a teenage runaway and "Benson's" main squeeze, and she demonstrates all the raw talent that would later lead to her unforgettable work on "Hee Haw". There's some (mostly Misty-related) nudity, but there's very little sex for this kind of flick and even less violence. But if you have a soft spot in your heart for early 70's drive-in Americana, you could do worse I guess.

Most of the time I give a film 10 stars if it entertains and 1 if it stinks in kind of a thumbs up or thumbs down vote... because picking the numbers in between seem a little too artificial for someone like me has no problem pointing out trash, liking trash, or criticizing a flawed movie that I ultimately still enjoyed.

However, with movies like this, unless they are absolutely horrible, I feel the need to give them 10 stars on principal because you always get exactly what they advertise that you're going to get.

In this case you get boobs, nudity, and hippies. The film bills itself about being about boobs and hippies. The plot makes it clear that you aren't going to get anything deeper than boobs and hippies.

If you sat down to watch this movie and expected anything other than boobs and hippies than either you were grossly misinformed or you were attempting to delude yourself because you felt guilty about watching a movie that is about nothing more than boobs and hippies.

However, there is a pretty funny line here and there that will make you laugh out loud and the soundtrack is actually exceptionally good... and those are two things that you don't really expect in a movie that is about really nothing more than boobs and hippies.

Some of the actors actually have pretty decent comedic timing and a few of them actually know how to deliver a believable line... which is, again, kind of shocking in a movie that is only about boobs and hippies.

And what makes it better is that, yeah, this was a drive-in sleaze movie in the era where these kind of movies played regularly at such fine institutions of American culture. There is something absolutely HYSTERICAL about putting an enormous film about boobs and hippies up on the big screen, where anyone driving by can get an eye full. I kind of miss that America, you know, the one without Puritanical Prudishness. The America where you might be driving down the road at night, and look off to the drive-in just to get an eye full of eight-foot tall boobs bouncing on an IMAX size screen somewhere in Middle America.

So, if you want boobs and hippies and 1970s drive-in sleaze this is one of the better ones you can watch.

I remember seeing this movie at the drive-in in the early seventies. We saw it packaged with a white trash biker film called 'Bummer' and another racy nudie flick. That was the 70s, man.

Anyhow, the main character in Hitchhikers is a young, unwed girl who gets pregnant by her boyfriend and then to avoid shame (remember this was a different era), she runs away from home to join a hippie commune. The commune leader, Benson, is a conniver like Manson who runs everything and ends up arranging an illegal abortion for the girl by blackmailing an unscrupulous doctor. (We get to see the shocking illegal abortion scene). Then we find out that the commune members support themselves by having the females hitchhike and flash motorists with nudity, then robbing those who stop for them. Imagine a stark naked or nearly naked girl in the road in front of you as you're driving down the road and you'll know why this ruse works.

The Hitchhikers pull their flash and rob scheme on mostly older men. Sometimes Benson, the commune leader, will pop out of the bushes with a gun and rob the guy or the girls will simply hop into the unsuspecting man's car near a busy intersection and cry rape ("you dirty old man !" or "now how about another $20 for that blouse you tore ! I'll scream !") to blackmail the guy into forking over all his green, lest he suffer extreme embarrassment in front of a crowd.

The girls in this movie are some pretty good eye candy and sometimes you're reminded of 'Girls Gone Wild' except these chics get paid by robbing you !

About the only funny line came when the crew robbed a Reverend on a rural road and left his car keys about a half mile down the road stuck to a bush, forcing him to crawl on hands and knees to retrieve the keys. He utters "Praise the Lord ! I almost got my ass blown off back there..."

There is little redeeming social value to this flick, but if you remember the seventies, hitchhiking was very big and some of this stuff like this actually went on in real life. I remember being warned about not picking up hitchhikers because of this 'cry rape' ruse.

If you want to be nostalgic, rent this flick, along with 'Bummer' some night and toke up. Or even better, find a white trash hippie/biker marathon at one of the few drive-in movies left in the country !