The stranger is the one in danger this time around in Umberto Lenzi's HITCHER IN THE DARK, on Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome.

It's spring break and you don't have to go to Fort Lauderdale for wet T-shirt contests (or Madonna concerts on the beach, apparently), and unassuming young Mark (Joe Balough, Andy Milligan's MONSTROSITY) drives up and down the coast in a luxury camper van picking up comely hitchhikers and slashing them to death, dumping their bodies in the surrounding swampland. His modus operandi changes when he picks up Daniela (MELROSE PLACE's Josie Bisset) who has run out on her flirting boyfriend Kevin (Jason Saucier, of Ken Russell's WHORE), seeing in her a resemblance to his own mother Danieska who ran out on him with her lover when he was a child, drugging and abducting her. With Mark swinging back and forth between desiring and loathing her for being "like all the others," Daniela attempts to manipulate him into letting his guard down long enough for her to escape. Meanwhile, Kevin undertakes his own investigation when the police fail to take Daniela's disappearance seriously.

Returning on a considerably smaller budget to the spring break setting of his earlier, sillier slasher NIGHTMARE BEACH – released stateside as WELCOME TO SPRING BREAK – Umberto Lenzi's HITCHER IN THE DARK is a deliberately and unrelentingly grim effort, focusing on a captivity scenario less ambiguous than that of Claudio Fragasso's fellow Joe D'Amato Filmirage slasher NIGHT KILLER. Although there are some interesting moments in the performances of Bisset and Balough, as well as some interesting characterization, those expecting more of a slasher will be disappointed, and the suspense never approaches the film its title references (although the Italian title translates as "Fear in the Dark", other territories also played up a nonexistent connection to Robert Harmon's film including West Germany with the title RETURN OF THE HITCHER). The synthesizer scoring of Carlo Maria Cordio (ABSURD) is intermittently effective, although one's familiarity with Filmirage may taint one's experience of the film upon recognizing the recycling of cues from KILLING BIRDS and WITCHERY. Bisset would also appear in D'Amato's Venetian-set erotic drama DESIRE just two years before her soap fame while Saucier had previously appeared in the Bayou Southern gothic slasher SISTER, SISTER and would subsequently appear in D'Amato's Filmirage productions TOP MODEL and CONTAMINTION .7 as well as his later erotic thriller THE HYENA, and Balough would subsequently appear in Lenzi's BLACK DEMONS. Lenzi's daughter Alessandra served as the film's assistant director, and his actress wife Olga Pehar (EYEBALL) is credited with the script.

Unreleased theatrically or on home video in the United States, HITCHER IN THE DARK first became widely available stateside on DVD from Media Blasters' Shriek Show line in 2003. Derived from a new 4K scan of the original camera negative, the film's 1080p24 MPEG-4 1.85:1 widescreen transfer is free of the diffusion evident in many of the Filmirage productions of the time lensed by D'Amato himself – no idea of the real identity of pseudonymous cinematographer Jerry Phillips – and it may indeed be one of the nicer-looking Filmirage productions on Blu-ray simply because the lighting and photography is rather straightforward with only the occasional vertical blind shadows used for lighting effects. Textures of sweaty skin and eighties hair are faithfully represented along with one or two prosthetic wounds that hold up well in HD. The only option is a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track, but the film was shot with sync-sound with none of the post-production mixing issues of KILLING BIRDS' mix. Optional English SDH subtitles are provided.