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*** This review may contain spoilers ***
While driving across lonely, misty, rain-streaked California backroads en route to Santa Barbara to visit her sister, nice middle-aged lady Clair (Cloris Leachman) decides to give handsome young hitchhiker Miles (Michael Brandon) a lift to San Francisco. Unbeknownst to Clair, Miles is really a volatile and dangerously unpredictable psychopath who's eager to get out of town as fast as possible because he just murdered his shamelessly flirtatious harlot stepmother (a memorably smoldering cameo by enticing brunette hottie Sherry Jackson of "Bare Knuckles" and "The Mini-Skirt Mob"). Meanwhile, gruff homicide detective Henry Darrow gives dogged chase. Tautly directed by Gordon ("Scream and Scream Again") Hessler, with a jittery score by Gil ("A Cold Night's Death") Melle, a pleasingly terse and to the point sense of streamlined narrative economy, and an especially harrowing conclusion, this gripping and suspenseful made-for-TV "danger on the road" thriller does the trick with spot-on satisfying brevity and effectiveness. Moreover, the performances are uniformly sound: Brandon delivers a genuinely chilling and convincing portrayal of the frighteningly unstable Miles, Leachman is excellent as usual (and at the time was acting in a slew of TV movies in both lead and secondary roles), and the ubiquitous Cameron Mitchell pops up as a helpful police captain. Tight, tense and absorbing, "Hitchhike!" is well worth picking up.
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