Sunday, May 25, 2014

Hitcher II: I've Been Waiting (2003)

After Jim kills a kidnapper while rescuing a child, he is let go from the police force.  He decides to take a trip to visit Captain Esterhage, who helped him when as a teen Jim was framed for multiple murders by a crazy hitchhiker he picked up.

Crop duster plane mechanic Maggie, Jim's girlfriend, is glad they're going away since she thinks Jim needs a vacation. But Jim's never mentioned his traumatic experience as a teen so Maggie is totally clueless as to why Jim freaks out when she insists on picking up a hitchhiker on a desert road.

Since this is a horror movie, we know that Maggie is going to rue the day she forced Jim to stop, and that this hitcher is going to make their lives hell.  Before you know it, Jim's right back in the same situation as the first film where a psycho hitcher has framed Jim and Maggie for murders and police are after them.  Jim is convinced this is the same hitcher he picked up before. No one shall ask how the killer got younger in the seventeen years since the original murders.

Please turn off your cranial functions when viewing the scene where Jack drops Maggie into an abandoned, super rickety water tower. It's so rotten that she can kick her way out of the thing. As she climbs down, the wooden ladder breaks (no one shall ask why she was climbing down a ladder that had only five rungs and a thirty foot drop at the end).

Maggie plummets to earth breaking through every rotten support on the tower, which leads the tower to collapse.  If it was so rotten, how did Jack manage to get her up there? I mean, he literally had to climb up the tower with her unconscious body, get on top of the water silo and drop her into it.  So one hundred pound Maggie collapses a water tower but it holds up for two hundred pound Jack carrying Maggies body?

Shortly after this, the movie broke streaming Netflix. Once we got back on, none of us cared enough to watch the end. This is a Hitcher sequel only in the sense that they slapped C. Thomas Howell into the first half hour and then had a psycho hitchhiker frame Maggie for murder.   They could have left Howell out and done the same movie, but then they wouldn't get suckers saying, "Oh a sequel to the Hitcher."


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