Watch The Hitchhikers For Free

Such a frustrating disappointment

Powerful

Excellent, smart action film.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

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.

This enjoyably goofy'n'duffy piece of 70's drive-in fluff centers on a six woman outlaw gang who prey on hapless backwoods motorists. The gals are owned and trained by the amiable, scruffy, pleasantly mellow Manson-like Benson (shaggy hairball Norman Klar), a charismatically breezy anti-establishment type who wants to raise enough money to purchase a bus so he and his female family can go to California. Naive, pregnant teen runaway Maggie (the lovely, busty, lusty blonde fox Misty Rowe, who was a regular on "Hee Haw" and played Marilyn Monroe in Larry Buchanan's tawdry biopic "Goodbye Norma Jean") joins the loose, fun-loving, law-breaking bunch and winds up fighting with possessive, rabidly envious and clinging iceberg bitch Diana (statuesque brunette Linda Avery) over who's got exclusive dibs on Benson.That's about it for the admittedly flimsy story and frankly who cares about some fancy-schmancy plot? In its place there's sunny cinematography, lots of roadside robberies, a generous sprinkling of gratuitous nudity, sexy chicks in skimpy apparel (Rowe in particular looks mighty enticing in a skimpy mini-dress), the inevitable skinny-dipping scene, a rowdy pot party, catchy folk-country songs grooving away on the soundtrack, some trashy melodrama (Maggie gets raped by a sleazy jerk and has a miscarriage), charmingly dated hippie slang ("Far out!"), a couple of catfights, a playfully amoral tone, and absolutely no pretense to get in the way of the giddy tongue-in-cheek silliness. Sure, it's dumb, pointless and meandering, which basically means that it's a sweetly stupid grindhouse relic from the halcyon heyday of exploitation cinema and hence a most entertaining source of undemanding no-brainer fun.

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.