Autostop rosso sangue (1977)

"Killing people is like building up debts. The more debts you build up, the more respect you have."

Hess pretty much reprises his Last House on the Left (1972) role in this gutsy road movie that plays like a toned-down Last House-on-wheels. Campanile manages to generate plenty of suspense around what is, after all, a rather slim premise, capably mixing the conventions of the road movie with those of the post-Last House horror film. The scenes in the car are remarkably gripping and compelling, given their limitations, an achievement due in no small part to the fine ensemble acting. Nero is excellent as the drunken, cynical Mancini, Clery is both intelligent and decorative, alternating between taking her clothes off at every possible opportunity and spitting out venemous one-liners, while Hess is simply Hess, here on excellent, disgusting form as the foul-mouthed, lecherous psycho. His relentless physical and psychological torture of his unwilling travelling companions may lack the galvanising sleaze factor of his turn in Last House on the Left but remains nontheless a powerful, tour-de-force performance.

As the unlikely trio blaze a trail of destruction across vast tracts of America's deserts, Campanile stages a number of memorable set-pieces - the cold hearted killing of a pair of Highway Patrol cops (a stunningly brutal sequence that packs a considerable visceral punch); the apparent killing of Adam by two of his partners-in-crime who unexpectedly turn up out of nowhere; Adam's subsequent revenge involving a stolen truck and a tip of the hat to Spielberg's Duel (1971); and the climactic battle of wills between the three protagonists and a gang of youths hell bent on running them off the road.

One of the film's great strengths lies in the fact that not one of its three central protagonists is at all likeable; Hess is a gibbering, brutish psychopath with distasteful sexual designs on Eve; she is an acid-tongued shrew who spends most of the film complaining loudly about her lot; while Mancini is a self-serving, drunken sot whose raison d'etre is the gratification of his own needs and desires and who seems to be working hard to catch up to Adam's levels of perversity. Around this immensely unlikeable triumverate, Campanile manages to construct a compelling drama that works almost in spite of itself.

Less successful are the leering and self-conscious sex scenes that periodically intrude, based solely, one presumes, on the willingness of Clery to get her kit off on command. The tacky, fumbling justifications for such scenes are embarrassing and out of touch with the rest of the film, which presents its other great taboo - violence, both physical and verbal - with an unflinching lack of self-consciousness.

Technical credits are impressive, with di Giacomo and Ruzzolini's photography in particular being of note. Coupled with Campanile's direction, they create a sense of brooding claustrophobia that belies the wide-open spaces of the film's primary settings. As ever, Morricone contributes a powerful and emotive score, though that entirely dreadful song we could easily have lived without.

As already alluded to, as well as being inspired by Craven's gut twisting tale of torture and depravity, Autostop rosso sangue also features a worthy tribute to Duel, as Clery and Nero are menaced by Hess who's commandeered a red truck. Given the film's nature as a straight-ahead road movie with psycho chiller overtones, it's perhaps only fitting that Spielberg's paranoid masterpiece should rear its delightful headlights in such fashion.
KEVIN LYONS