Extensive re-write of the 1986 road-movie thriller of the same name, altering but not eliminating the truck-pull pièce de résistance, the tearing of limb from limb. What emerges from the overhaul is a no-fun Spring Break for a collegiate Cute Couple harassed by a homicidal highway menace (supernatural or just supersilly?) against whom the New Mexico cops are as helpless as though they were up against the Terminator. What it tells us is nothing more than how rapidly time marches on. We now seem to have come to the point where a young filmmaker (Dave Meyers, a music-video guy) can reach back into his youth, no further than the mid-Eighties, and hold up as a screen classic such a complete pièce de crap. That very word, as it happens, issues from the car radio when a distant deejay introduces "a classic from David Soul," albeit an artifact from way back in the Seventies, "Don't Give Up on Us, Baby." Without any question this is meant as a joke, though it's hardly a bigger joke than an awestruck remake of The Hitcher. With Sean Bean, Sophia Bush, Zachary Knighton, Neal McDonough. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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