The 1970s certainly didn't have a shortage of rough rape-revenge films coming out of Italy, ranging from the direct spawn of Last House on the Left like Night Train Murders and Last House on the Beach to scuzzier and more original variants like House on the Edge of the Park and Terror Express. Somewhere in the middle and one of the most prestigious of these is Hitch-Hike (a.k.a. Autostop Rosso Sangue and also shown as Death Drive and The Naked Prey), the first of several films made by David Hess in Italy thanks to the recommendation of his co-star in 1976's 21 Hours at Munich, Franco Nero. Both men seem to be trying to outdo each other to see who can be the most loathsome character, with Corinne Cléry, fresh off her star-making role in Story of O, stuck in the middle.

While hauling their trailer across the Italian-ish California desert to L.A., abusive and foul-tempered reporter Walter (Nero) and his wife, Eve (Cléry), can barely stop hurling barbs at each other for two minutes. After stopping for the night to socialize with some musically-challenged society dropouts, they decide to relieve their boredom by picking up a hitchhiker, Adam (Hess). When the new arrival turns nasty, Walter ejects him from the car and gets into a fistfight that ends with Adam brandishing a gun. As it turns out, he's an unhinged robber on the run with two million dollars, and he needs them to get him to civilization and avoid the two partners he double crossed. Much violence and torment ensue.

Quite a bit more layered and ambiguous than you might expect, Hitch-Hike often feels like a particularly nasty version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with a gate-crashing David Hess complicating things for a big chunk of the running time. (Incredibly, it even spawned a Japanese remake in 2013 released by Troma!) It's easily the darkest film from director Pasquale Festa Campanile, who had started off writing films for Luchino Visconti and directed the popular When Women Had Tails and its sequel, the splashy erotic gems The Libertine and The Slave, and one of Bud Spencer's best solo films, Soldier of Fortune. Today one of its most celebrated aspects is the powerful, eccentric score by Ennio Morricone, one of the very few still stuck in rare vinyl purgatory as of now, and no one else could have possibly come up with the sounds he achieves here. As with several other Italian films on the extreme side, this was picked up for U.S. distribution by Hallmark but didn't make much of an impact at the time; instead word of mouth only really got around when it hit Japanese VHS and bootleg copies began floating around on the tape trading circuit. (Some other international VHS versions also sported an odd, alternate version of the fireside rape scene obscuring much of the nudity, but all options around now have been uncensored for years.) In 2002 Anchor Bay released the film on DVD, with Blue Underground porting it over in 2008 with just a logo change; the film was uncut and came with the English trailer and a typically solid featurette, "The Devil Thumbs a Ride" (17m38s), with Nero, Cléry, and Hess sharing some priceless stories about the shoot.

In 2016, Raro brought the film to Blu-ray with a significantly improved scan that revealed how heavily cropped the DVD was, with a healthier color scheme as well. While the DVD was English only (how the film was shot, though Cléry was dubbed), this time you also get the Italian track with optional English subtitles. This time the only extra is "Road to Ruin" (26m29s) featuring the same interviews with the three main cast members now with assistant director Neri Parenti, plus an insert with an essay by Bret Wood. A U.K. option also beat that one to the punch by a few months featuring the same scan from 88 Films, also in English or Italian, but with no significant extras (just some bonus trailers) plus an insert essay by Calum Waddell.

In 2025, Indicator added the film to its roster of Italian UHD and Blu-ray upgrades with an impressive 4K restoration from the original negative, with the HDR10-compatible Dolby Vision grade on the UHD bringing out healthier flesh tones and more punch in those arid desert shots. The detail increases quite a bit here which helps with textures like foliage and clothing, giving the film an even more tactile feel. Here you get the option of playing either the English or Italian versions with their respective title sequences, both sounding nice in LPCM 1.0 mono with new and improved English translated or SDH subtitles. A new audio commentary by Eugenio Ercolani and Marcus Stiglegger does a fine job of parsing out this challenging film including the backgrounds of the director and cast, the placement within Italian rape-revenge movies, a very convincing reading of the Eve character during that fireside scene, the supposed alternate "happy" French ending created via some editorial trickery, and the effect of that harsh sunlight aesthetic that dominates the majority of the running time.

A newly updated and massively expanded version of "Road to Ruin" (87m23s) with a lot more background about the participants, the films they made leading up to this, memories of the whiskey-loving Campanile, and their positive thoughts on the production. "Adventures in Abruzzo" (25m3s) is a new interview with Parenti going more into his experiences on a multitude of films and the directors he worked with over the years, and in "The Novelist's Revenge" (28m11s), Ercolani surveys Campanile and how this film stands apart from the genre pack (if it even really belongs there at all) in its unorthodox handling of both sexual assault and the idea of violent payback. In "The Coldest of Dishes" (60m37s), Ercolani digs further into the rape-revenge subgenre in Italy (with interview excerpts with Cléry, Ruggero Deodato, Massimo Antonello Geleng, Zora Kerova, Abel Ferrara, and Macha Meril for more context) including how Last House served as a springboard but was greatly recontextualized abroad with a frequent political aspect. Also included are the archival "The Devil Thumbs a Ride" featurette, the Italian trailer, two international trailers, the U.K. trailer, and an 88-image gallery with stills, production photos, poster and home video art, and more. The limited edition also comes with an 80-page book with an essay by Mikel J Koven, an archival profile of Campanile, and extracts from archival interviews with screenwriter Ottavio Jemma, Morricone, and the three leads.

INDICATOR (UHD)

RARO (Blu-ray)

ANCHOR BAY (DVD)

Reviewed on December 1, 2025