I have a strong suspicion that producer Roger Corman, upon seeing the huge success of the major studio movie FATAL ATTRACTION, rushed this movie into production. This may explain why that, even for Roger Corman, this is an extremely tacky production. Even on DVD, the movie's visuals look so bad that you would swear this was made in the early 1970s and kept unmaintained on a shelf for the next fifteen years. There's bad sound (a couple of times when a car door slams shut, you don't hear anything!), bad continuity from shot to shot, and sets and furnished actual rooms looking hastily set up and constructed. You even clearly see the shadow of the boom mike on the ground in one shot! But even if the movie had better production values, it wouldn't help that much. The acting by all the leads is lacking passion, coming across instead as bland and lacking real emotion. But the script really drops the ball. After a while, the movie stops trying to build terror, and almost forgets the character of the drifter in the second half of the movie! Projects like this explain why Corman's movies soon after stopped getting theatrical releases.
Review of The Drifter
