Hitch-hike (1977)

Holy shit! David Hess actually appeared in a movie that’s enjoyable to watch. After the plodding misogyny of House on the Edge of the Park and the overrated crappiness of Last House on the Left, I was wondering if everyone’s favorite cinematic scumbag rapist ever acted in anything decent. Indeed he did- Autostop rosso Sangue, known in the US as Hitch-hike is good twisted fun. Is it any surprise that he plays a scumbag rapist kidnapper here?
Basically, Hitch-hike is a cat & mouse movie in which three different characters are trying to be the cat. A bickering husband and wife get abducted by a hitchhiker while traveling across the American west (or its Italian equivalent) and each of them vies for power over the other two while weird psychosexual charges are exchanged. It’s a bit like an exploitation flick version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”.

The husband, an alcoholic Italian writer (played to the hilt by Franco Nero, Django himself) with a rich wife, compensates for his feelings of personal failure by abusing his wife mercilessly. The dubbing, by Nero himself, is of the Whatsamattayoo? school of Italian English making his constant attempts to paw or insult her much more amusing than they should be. He’s easily the worst male chauvinist since Gabrielle Tinti in Velluto Nero and makes one wonder how bed gender relations really were in 1970s Italy. Seriously, the guy is a charmer!

The wife (played by Connie Clery of Moonraker), meanwhile, is way out of this schmuck’s league and clearly knows it. One of the major themes of the movie is that she has a sexy body and the camera takes it in as often as possible. Her dissatisfaction with her drunken lout of a husband explains why she picks up the sketchy looking hitchhiker (played by David Hess) to piss him off and why she seems to flirt with the idea of letting him have his way with her once he takes them hostage. Maybe she likes the attention and maybe she just likes hurting hubby.

Hess, meanwhile, plays a psycho bank robber who wants to get away with his money, humiliate the husband and screw the wife, and possibly get the lout to write a book about him and become famous! The writer manipulates his desire for fame, while also humiliating him for having escaped from a loony bin. And the wife seems to hate him, but maybe hates her husband more and maybe likes the sexual attention from this creep.

In a mainstream movie, these tensions would play just beneath the surface with little coming of them. Luckily, this is Italian exploitation so Hess ends up tying up the husband and fucking his eager wife right in front of him before she comes back naked with a shotgun to blow him away! There’s also a crazy truck and camper chase straight out of Duel, rivals from the bank robbery gang who want the money, and an ultra-violent twist ending. The movie works wonderfully at maintaining the tension and paying it off with sex and violence. It’s also a good example of how entertaining it is to watch completely amoral people trying to overpower each other.

Update: Here's the trailer with the great Ennio Morricone score as well as the sex scene with Djano crying. As if it's not hot to watch your wife fuck someone else. What??? Just saying.

House on the Edge of the Park (1980)

Poor David Hess- it's got be hard for an actor to get typecast as a rapist. That's pretty much what happened to Hess after he appeared in the sleeper hit Last House on the Left. He's a compelling actor and accomplished musician, but for years the only roles Hess could get were variations on his thug character from Last House. This film is an Italian Last House ripoff that even rips of the name, making its lineage even more evident. It's a better made film than Last House, although that's not exactly saying much.

Hess plays Alex (probably a Clockwork Orange reference), a young disco-hopping hooligan whose problems with the opposite sex are pretty clearly established in the opening sequence, in which he drives a young woman he saw in a discoteque earlier off the road and britally rapes and strangles her in a scene that is even more disturbing due to its light disco ballad score. It's also sort of amazing that nobody saw this assault since the film is set in New York City. But, whatever- the very next scene shows Alex working at the garage with his hooligan friend Ricky (played by Giovanni Radice of Cannibals in the Streets, The Beyond, and numerous other Italian exploitation flicks in his first role) and they're looking to hit the late 70s streets and boogie.

Into the garage comes a rich, sophisticated couple with minor car problems who, in a pretty unbelievable twist, invite the two thugs to a little soiree of five rich assholes with the intention of making fun of them. The class dynamnics are pretty sharp in these early scenes, with the beautiful rich girl (played by the gorgeous Annie Belle of Laure) Lisa aroused by Alex but unwilling to have sex with him, and the snotty young men getting Ricky drunk in order to make a fool of him. Soon the little party is getting the dim thug to strip for them and ripping him off in a rigged card game.



Before you know it, though, the tables are turned and Hess is holding the kids hostage with a straight razor. Let's consider that again: he is holding five strangers hostage in their own home with nothing but a straight razor, and for most of the movie nobody gets the idea to just throw a chair at him! He throws one dude in the swimming pool and pisses on him, smashes another's face in on the pool table, rapes Annie Bell (although she eventually gets on top- classy), and finally slices up a young friend who comes to the door on the couch with the razor, and nobody stops him. That last bit, incidentally, is excruciatingly cruel and misogynist: Cindy (Brigitte Petronio) is a virgin, so Hess strips her naked and takes at least a dozen slashes out of her on the couch. It's scenes like this that have given the film a notorious reputation.

Again, though, the framework of the story is so stupid and unbelievable that you start to tune out until the last ten minutes in which there's a twist that is supposed to explain everything, but which is even stupider than the original storyline! So, for about an hour and half The House on the Edge of the Park is drawn out thuggery with serious logical problems. Annie Belle is hot as usual and David Hess is lots of fun to watch, and Ruggero Deodato's direction is fairly competent, but the film will lower your IQ by 20 points.