I can hear you out there. You're saying, I wish Umberto Lenzi made another movie in Florida right after Nightmare Beach. And I hope its a ripoff of The Hitcher but about a rich kid in an RV and that it's so scummy that I feel like a Silkwood shower still wouldn't make me feel clean.

Good news, friend. There's Hitcher In the Dark, a film that crosses off every horrible thing on your deranged bucket list.

Mark Glazer wants to have sex with his dead mother.

If that upsets you, seriously, move on to another review.

He's driving around in his rich daddy's RV and picking up female hitchhikers to assault, murder and take Polaroids of. That's when he runs into Daniela (Josie Bissett, who somehow moved on to the tamer - if that's possible - Melrose Place),who he turns into a living version of his mother. And thanks to a cocktail of Stockholm Syndrome and Italian movie making magic, she starts to fall for our killer.

Originally, this movie ended with Mark getting away with it. But hey - they added on a little end where Daniela finally gets her revenge.

Amazingly, someone released this on a three pack with Hell High and The Majorettes. I can only imagine how people felt being confronted by this movie.

Although this is a road movie ,Lenzi's screenplay (Lenzi takes an American name in the cast and credits of the version I saw)is roughly a photocopy of William Wyler's impressive "the collector" (1965) with snatches of "Psycho" (the mother) and "Vertigo" (how to turn a woman into another one)thrown in.A collector who would travel all across the country ,picking up girls and (well read the plot)...The dialog is most of the time funnier than it is scary,and acting is particularly poor.Some scenes such as the "beauty" contest are mostly filler.At times ,it seems that Lenzi is begging to be taken seriously : there is a "poetic" scene when the "hero" helps a bird to fly away.But most of the time it is Punch and Judy level with vodka,handcuffs and pills galore.One can save ,at a pinch,the scene in the drive- in where people are having fun watching a farce while horrible things happen not far from them.

Misogynistic psycho wackjob Mark (a creepily manic and intense performance by handsome beefcake hunk Joe Balogh) wears mirror shades, suffers from a severe mommy complex, drives a fancy expensive Winnebago, and has a nasty penchant for picking up stray foxy young female hitchhikers whom he likes to rape, debase and brutally murder. Mark chooses the feisty Daniela (gorgeous blonde hottie Josie Bissett, who went on to slightly more respectable work as a regular on the trashy nighttime soap opera "Melrose Place") as his next victim and abducts her. Daniela's obsessive boyfriend Kevin (woodenly played by Jason Saucier) gives chase.

Limply directed by spaghetti splatter specialist Umberto ("Nightmare City") Lenzi (who also wrote the flat, clichéd, talky cookie cutter script),with slack pacing, nil suspense, mostly mild and goreless violence, atrocious acting, and a humdrum plot which offers no fresh twists or novel surprises, this strictly from hunger Eurodreck rip-off of "The Hitcher" qualifies as a real stinker. However, both Jerry Phillip's polished cinematography and Carlo Maria Cordio's throbbing rock score are up to par, while the copious gratuitous nudity rates as the single most watchable and enjoyable thing in this whole godforsaken turkey (said nudity includes several scenes of Bissett in the buff and an especially tasty wet t-shirt contest). And hardcore Bissett bashers such as yours truly should get a kick out of the extensive degradation Josie suffers throughout the flick: she's drugged, gagged and handcuffed by our star loony, has her hair cut short and dyed black, gets photographed by nutso while nude and unconscious, and is even forced to watch the freak carve the word "pig" in Kevin's chest. Taking that last nugget into consideration, I guess this picture ain't so bad after all.