FRIENDS OF ‘HITCHER’

What’s all this excitement over “The Hitcher”?

Have any of you people actually seen the movie? I doubt it. Next to today’s average horror flick, “The Hitcher” is mild by comparison. There are no on-screen mutilations, decapitations or butcherings as Caulfield’s article and your readers suggest. All of the supposed graphic violence takes place off-screen .

If you want to discuss on-screen graphic violence, why not mention Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” with its death-by-chain-saw sequence, or his “Body Double,” where a woman is murdered with a huge power drill.

And even more extreme is the incredibly gory “Re-Animator,” which was a feast of on-screen carnage, including a decapitation by shovel, boring through a man’s chest with an electric saw, strangulation using a human intestine and rape by a zombie that is so perverse and disgusting it could not be printed if described.

“The Hitcher” is a very stylish suspense film that implies its violence rather than shows it. If you want to pick on slasher films, pick on “Friday the 13th I, II, III, IV, etc.”

Or better yet, actually go see the films you choose to trash.

GREG CLAUSEN

Chatsworth