15, 90mins

The first few minutes of Dave Meyers’s remake of The Hitcher are desperately tense. A car cruises down a lonely highway at night in the pouring rain. The young driver fiddles with the radio. He looks up to see a drenched man standing in the middle of the road. He swerves to avoid hitting him. The car lurches to a halt. A blurred figure is visible in the rear view mirror. Panic grips Jim Halsey (Zachary Knighton) and his shapely girlfriend Grace Andrews (Sophia Bush). Their 1970 Oldsmobile 442 stalls. Just as John Ryder (Sean Bean) reaches for the door handle the engine guns back to life, and the couple tear off.

They are pursued relentlessly for the rest of the film, and framed as serial killers by the demonic and ghostly Bean. It’s so similar in method and mood to Robert Harmon’s 1986 original starring Rutger Hauer that you wonder why Meyers bothered at all. The answer is simple. The ingredients still scare us 20 years on.

What’s interesting is how much Harmon’s original shocked viewers. It was criticised for its depravity and motiveless violence. But that shock value has moved from being the exception to the norm. The fright genre is being bent out of shape by films such as Eli Roth’s ghastly Hostel, which features people paying to torture tourists in Eastern Europe. I simply can’t understand why such films are playing in high street cinemas. They fatally abandon any sense of mystery and revel in freaks and pornographic violence.

True, there is plenty of visceral brutality in Meyers’s up-date of The Hitcher, notably when Bean springs the couple, who have been charged with murder, from a police station. “Why are you doing this?” Bush screams.

The black irony is that the frantic lovers feel the trap tighten even when Bean is miles from the scene. The blood won’t be to everyone’s taste, but the film is not unpleasantly graphic. It basically pays homage to the iconic road movie stalkers who include (if you can forgive the horse) Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter (1955), and assorted psycho-pathic truck-drivers from Spielberg’s Duel (1971) to John Dahl’s Joy Ride (2001).

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