Timing has a lot to do with how and why movies leave lasting impressions. Take, for example, this thoroughly unremarkable telefilm about the dangers of catching car rides from strangers. Essentially an afterschool special with a higher level of menace (it aired in primetime), the picture tells the paper-thin story of Julie, an average California teenager from a good home who ignores myriad warning signs while hitching back and forth from the suburbs to her summer job at a fast-food joint on the beach. Julie is played by pint-sized bombshell Charlene Tilton, at the time a big TV star on Dallas, and her costars include fell0w small-screen players Katherine Helmond, Christopher Knight, Craig T. Nelson, and Dick Van Patten. Viewers are treated to bland scenes of Julie debating the pros and cons of hitchhiking with her worried dad, plus vignettes of Julie’s romantic adventures. Meanwhile, Julie’s unfortunate friends get rides from skeezy dudes, including a serial killer who prowls the SoCal highways in a muscle car with darkly tinted windows.
As directed by competent action guy Ted Post, Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker is ordinary except when it lays on the horror-movie clichés—every time the serial killer is about to strike, Post cuts to a montage of detail close-ups showing the murderer’s car revving up. And while this visual allusion to a pervert getting turned on is laughably obvious, it’s also crudely effective. Or at least it seemed that way when I was 10, which is where the whole business of timing enters the discussion. Watching this flick during its original broadcast, I was just old enough to grasp the storyline’s discussion of rape, and just young enough to buy into the paranoid implication that every footstep on the shoulder of a highway was a move into the path of a roaming murderer.
Because of this collision between a fraught subject and a receptive audience, the movie’s lurid mixture of cautionary-tale seriousness and exploitation-flick tackiness did a number on my young brain. Adding fuel to the Freudian fire, the sight of Tilton and her sexy pals strutting around in skimpy shorts and tight T-shirts was enjoyable, but the cheap thrills were tainted by the subconscious knowledge that I was replicating the same male gaze as the flick’s psychotic antagonist. Anyway, you can see why these were not the easiest concepts for my preadolescent mind to process. As to whether Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker retains any of its mojo when encountered outside its original context, that’s for others to say. Likely not, though.
Because of this collision between a fraught subject and a receptive audience, the movie’s lurid mixture of cautionary-tale seriousness and exploitation-flick tackiness did a number on my young brain. Adding fuel to the Freudian fire, the sight of Tilton and her sexy pals strutting around in skimpy shorts and tight T-shirts was enjoyable, but the cheap thrills were tainted by the subconscious knowledge that I was replicating the same male gaze as the flick’s psychotic antagonist. Anyway, you can see why these were not the easiest concepts for my preadolescent mind to process. As to whether Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker retains any of its mojo when encountered outside its original context, that’s for others to say. Likely not, though.
Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker: FUNKY
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