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n this compilation of 10 episodes of the long-running cable TV anthology series, Page Fletcher is the Hitchhiker, a latter-day Rod Serling who thumbs his way into the prologues and tag segments of tales of darkness and the supernatural.
In "O.D. Feelin'," lovably picaresque scamps and urchins in an oh-so-edgy future metropolis fight and die for a bag of spooky white powder. "True Believer" is the story of a hard-bitten cop investigating a murder in a closed convent; fans of 1980's Flash Gordon might have fun seeing Ornella Muti, Princess ("Not the Bore Worms!") Aura herself, playing a nun. "Perfect Order" features Virginia Madsen terrorized by an obsessive photographer, which dovetails with "Dead Heat," in which Fred Ward plays an obsessive sculptor, and "Secret Ingredient," in which Candy Clark crosses paths with an obsessive salesman.
Law & Order fans can see the late Jerry Orbach in "Cabin Fever" as an older hubby cuckolded by a stud-muffin resplendent in gigolo finery from the L.L. Bean catalogue. M*A*S*H loyalists can see Elliott Gould, the original Trapper John McIntyre, in "A Whole New You" get a whole new him thanks to some unorthodox surgery. Before doing huge-budget Tom Clancy movies, director Phillip Noyce did the episodes "The Curse," about Harry Hamlin and voodoo, and "Man of Her Dreams," about a woman with psychic flashes. Somewhere between Wrath of Khan and Cheers, Kirstie Alley shacked up in a supernatural hotel in "Out of the Night." As for the Hitchhiker ... why doesn't anybody give this guy a lift?
Thin times before Fat Actress
The director's commentary by Carl Schenkel for "True Believer" illustrates the shortcomings of the Hitchhiker series as a whole. Schenkel describes mad dashes to create a cogent narrative out of a script that had to be tossed because it was too expensive to film as written. Episodes of The Hitchhiker all seem to be badly improvised or furiously rewritten during shooting.
In "A Whole New You," an off-camera character is mentioned as being dead, yet in a later scene is referred to as being likely to get offed. "Man of Her Dreams" ends with a character with an obsessive compulsion fulfilling that compulsion in a way that would require precognition. Echoing a long line of tired horror stories, The Hitchhiker episodes deal with people getting comeuppance from On High or through the supernatural. The means by which these moments of comeuppance arrive are tortuous and contrived. In "Cabin Fever," characters double-cross and triple-cross each other, anticipating each other's moves in impossible ways. The snap-of-the-dragon's-tail endings of comeuppance that made Twilight Zone often so memorable in The Hitchhiker feel like desperate surrenders on the part of the writers and directors to just get the damned story over with as the production ran out of money, time or filmstock. This is most distressing, as the writers, directors and cast of the show are all quite talented and have done much better work elsewhere.
The show, unlike Twilight Zone in its '60s and '80s incarnations, Night Gallery and the original Outer Limits, is too dated to transcend its times. The Hitchhiker comes across as fodder for '80s satires like The Wedding Singer and Donnie Darko, leading viewers to believe that the sublimity and mystery of the universe cannot be faced in distressed leather, hair mousse and acid-washed jeans.
The Hitchhiker was OK to watch on late-night cable if you had insomnia, but in the cold light of un-sleep-fogged day, the show doesn't hold up even as a time-waster. The episode "The Curse," written by the very fine Thomas Baum, writer of the neglected classic The Sender, and directed by Noyce, is a real standout, however. ... —Mike
Also in this issue: The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D and Howl's Moving Castle
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