Hidden beneath this 2007 thriller lies one of the more important questions of our generation: What the fuck is wrong with misogynistic killers in mainstream movies these days?

Some words of advice for the villain in The Hitchhiker. You are a cinematic serial killer/rapist and you've bought an assortment of ballgags, duct tape and rope. Very good. But why stop there? Get yourself some whips. Buy some electric-torture devices. Go to a hardware store and arm yourself with some good old-fashioned pliers. Have some fun with your victims, goddammit! Oh, and find yourself a brain while you're at it.

But no. You've decided that shooting your victims will suffice.

This is a perfect example of "wasted potential." The killer is not very imaginative. In fact, he's rather boring. And to top it off, he's also an idiot whose sloppy work is a constant irritation.

The first death scene isn't even shown in this movie. Jack (Jeff Denton), a psychotic killer who hates women, pulls over to the side of an empty highway at night and opens his truck to reveal a damsel in jeans and blouse with a red ballgag stuffed in her mouth and her hands taped together in front. Her convincing screams are muffled, but Jack removes the gag. She hollers for help into the empty night as Jack silently digs her grave. Actually, this was a rather chilling scene, which fades out before she is killed.

We fade in at dawn with four hot women in a car who surprisingly haven't driven each other nuts with their inane conversation. We have our heroine, the typical level-headed brunette (Sarah Lieving), the slutty blonde, the broken-hearted blonde and the rather boring one who you just know will be the first to die. After seeing Jack hitchhiking on the road, they decide to pick him up because "he's hot'' and it's Christmas.

After developing car trouble they go to a motel, get drunk and sink to the depths of retarded dialogue.

"I bet he has a big cock."

"How can you tell?"

"Just the way he carries himself. He's very confident."

"Hmmm. I agree."

This attempt at character development succeeds in making the viewer have no sympathy at all for any of the women in this movie. (Maybe that was the director's intent? To show that women like this get what they deserve?)

Anyhow, the boring one gets horny after a few beers. She sneaks into Jack's room and strips to her underwear. He takes her from behind in a standing position and puts a semi-chokehold on her and pulls her hair. Then he has her missionary on the bed, her tits exposed, and thrusts away while choking her with one hand. She's clearly uncomfortable, but not exactly hating it, in this brief scene.

The next day, Jack concocts some spiked drinks for the ladies. Level-headed brunette wakes up and finds the motel manager dead. Jack takes her to a room covered in plastic sheets where her three friends are sitting on the floor, hands duct taped in front and sort of over the fingers. Two are wearing red ballgags. And the other one, well, I had to look at this closely, is ring gagged. But the ring is in sideways and is not forcing her mouth open. In fact, it looks like a mini frisbee wedged between her lips. How stupid is that? If I wanted to see people with frisbees in their mouths, I'd check out a documentary on that rainforest tribe that Sting used to hang around with.

(There's only one shot of the ring gag. Perhaps some GIMPer on the production team later pointed out that flaw and they removed all the scenes.)

Jack knocks out the level-headed one. She comes to with her wrists taped together. Jack removes all the gags and explains how he was betrayed by his true love and now hates all women, blah blah blah.

The broken-hearted blonde says she can relate to him, so he gets her topless at knife-point and throws her on the bed. Then he orders the level-headed brunette on the bed and rapes her for a few seconds. Now it's blondie's turn, from behind, as she sobs. Both women do not really fight back so the violence and passion are lacking. But the biggest problem is that the entire rape scene lasts for only about a minute because Jack-ass had cut away the tape on the brunette's wrists. While he's raping the blonde, the brunette grabs a sheet of plastic and wraps it around his head and he loses consciousness.

The four women escape, find their car won't start, and go back to finish off the killer. He shoots and kills the boring one and recaptures the remaining ones. Again, they are taped hands in front.

A young couple shows up at the motel. Jack kills the guy and uses rope to tie the woman's hands after pistol-whipping her.

Now our killer is really starting to piss me off. He's got a second chance to be really nasty to these women. But alas, he tortures them by blathering on about how women can't be trusted. Then he blows away the slutty one. He's got a thing for the level-headed brunette, so he tapes her legs together on the bed, cuddles her fully clothed body in the spoon position and sleeps.

The girlfriend of the dead guy uses her cellphone to call 911. We can also see that the ropes around her wrists are about as loose as the boring one when she's drunk.

The cops come, a shootout occurs, followed by a car chase and a rather predictable ending that took forever to unfold.

To sum up, the movie itself is a standard thriller with no real surprises. The women are all fairly attractive (although annoying as hell), and there isn't too much gore. The acting is average.

But as is often the case, the movie itself and the GIMP scenes come down to the villain. In Hitchhiker, our killer does have some good qualities for our purposes. He rapes the two in front of the other two, and gets one of them topless. He can be menacing, as shown when he shoved the barrel of the gun in the brunette's mouth. He's also not hesitant to smack around his victims. And he did use ballgags.

But he has so many more faults. He's not particularly scary. He talks way too much. And the sloppiness. Oh the sloppiness! His rope tie was a joke. He bound their hands in front. He removed their gags or bindings WAY too early or for no apparent reason. He didn't bother checking for that cellphone. And he slept when he should have been torturing these women. How could such a careless criminal be on the loose for so long?

If the writers had bothered to give Jack some imagination or creativity (and a brain), the movie--and the GIMP scenes--would have been so much better.

As it stands, Jack the killer knows jack shit about what to do with helpless females.

I give the movie a C- and the GIMP scenes a C.

Some stills are available here.

Warning: There are many other movies of the same title.