The Hitchhikers (1972)

Pretty Good

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

THE HITCHHIKERS is a steady slice of exploitation from the early 1970s about a group of criminal hitchhiking girls, presided over by a creepy hippy guy, who make a living out of entrapping unwary motorists. Their usual method is to get in the guy's car, cry rape and then blackmail him for some ready cash. Occasionally robbery-at-gunpoint is brought into play too. There's little more to the story than that, and watching it it soon becomes apparent that the story is being endlessly padded out in order to reach feature-length proportions.The main character is a young blonde woman who falls pregnant and decides to escape from her boyfriend and family. She soon falls in with the above-mentioned crowd, at which point the film's most shocking and distasteful scene occurs: a graphic abortion which is really sickening stuff. Otherwise, the story is quite tame, with little in the way of violence or nudity that the tagline and poster promises. It's an amateurish effort with an amateur cast who don't make much effort, shot on the back roads in California somewhere. What's most annoying is that this film has a definite beginning and middle, but no ending at all.

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.

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 !

All I remember about this movie is the annoying soundtrack. There's this really sleepy sounding hippie voice singing over a jam band or an acoustic guitar. He says, "Here comes Benson" over and over in a nasally lazy voice because the main character is Benson, who is running from the law. All the songs are actually made for the movie. To this day, it is the main thing I remember about it.The other memorable part is the hippie commune in the desert and how dirty everyone was. People just did whatever Benson said. They robbed motorists who were nice enough to stop to offer them rides when the hippies would pretend to hitchhike. The characters were just plain mean, and the sick part was that they got away with it. No conscience on any of them. And that annoying song! It was like it was trying really hard to be free lovin' and hippie-like, but the characters were just too mean to be respected.Left me with a bad taste in my mouth and a bad song in my head.