A killer is driving around the desert picking up sexy hitchhikers and selling their organs on the black market. No one apparently told Sally (Ely LaMay) and she foolishly accepts a ride from a weirdo named Slim (John Blyth Barrymore). Before long, Sally finds herself chained up in his basement with her vital organs ready to be put on an inventory list.
Usually, whenever some low budget filmmaker tries to ape the Grindhouse aesthetic, it comes off looking cheap. Most of the time it resembles someone using an iPhone filter on the camera to recreate a scratchy print. The opening scene of Hitchhiker Massacre is one of the best emulations of the Grindhouse look I have seen outside of Grindhouse. They actually went through the trouble of making the lighting and camerawork match the old exploitation movies, so the illusion is near perfect. If it wasn’t for the modern dress and cellphones, you’d swear this was a ‘70s flick. They even use the “Missing Reel” gimmick to good effect and cap everything off with a great homage to Lucio Fulci’s Zombie.
Too bad they drop the aesthetic after the opening credits as it looks like a “real” movie most of the time. They do dabble in some various artistic flourishes. During one gore scene, the film switches to black and white, which I guess was an homage to Kill Bill switching color palettes for the bloody sequences. The rest of the flick is OK (there’s a decent impromptu surgery with an Exacto knife), but I just wish they kept up the old timey look throughout the entire running time. As it is, they pretty much shoot their wad in the first ten minutes.
I did like the fact that it co-starred lesser-known relatives of the Barrymore, Carradine, and Cronyn acting families. That helps to keep the Grindhouse tradition going by trading in on nepotism. Oh, and it was (posthumously) produced by Ivan Nagy (remember him?), which gives it a bit of cred too.
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