Poor Larry Cohen. The man is responsible for establishing some of the most original B-pics in the cult movie firmament, (IT'S ALIVE!, MANIAC COP, GOD TOLD ME TO, the list goes on), yet he barely ever got the same respect as a Roger Corman or a Jonathan Demme. Whatever. He still has the chops to 'kick out the jams' with recent efforts like CELLULAR and PHONE BOOTH, and he shows with this MOH entry that he's still going strong.
Screenwriter David Schow does him a big favor by providing a larger-than-life duo of mythic characters ripped straight from urban legend/campfire tales and plunked right down into your living room...where you can watch them from the grateful safety of your comfy couch.
A transit busload of unfortunate stereotypes breaks down in the middle of Northeast Bumble-you-know-what, and have the rotten luck of meeting cute with not one, but TWO psychopaths for the price of one! There's Wheeler, the amiable curmudgeon of a trucker who has one helluva hobby: he loves to 86 people who ask him for rides. The other is a ruggedly handsome Man-In-Black named Walker. His M.O.? He's a hitcher who kills people who pick him up.
Anybody worth their weight in Friday THE 13TH and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET boxed sets knows how this is going to turn out, and for the majority of the bus riders it does, save for one independent-minded Goth grrl named Stacy, played by Trivial Pursuit question extraordinaire Fairuza Balk.
Yes, PICK ME UP does have a kind of "been there, done that" feel to it, but it's also sort of comforting, after some of the wild misfires that have come before in this series. Plus, Cohen knows how to work with actors and get the best out of them. Where Balk is the only one who has a tendency to grate on the nerves, (the whole Goth grrl thing is SOOO 'last decade'), it's so great to see him team up with his old buddy from Q, THE WINGED SERPENT and THE STUFF, the wonderfully eccentric Michael Moriarty as the trucker, Wheeler. Like his contemporaries, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken and of course, Jack Nicholson, you never know what to expect from Michael. Even in a movie that stinks to high heaven, he manages to keep his performances sharp, his characters interesting.
Ditto Warren Kole as Walker, whose work I have never seen before now. It makes me wish that he'd somehow been discovered before any versions of Stephen King's THE STAND had been filmed, because THIS is how Randall Flagg should've been played. His aw-shucks charm even as he's skinning some poor young thang makes Walker that much more chilling, and he holds his own well on-screen with the grizzled vet Moriarty in their scenes together. They are so connected in fact, that poor Fairuza just fades into the woodwork.
The length of the ep is just about right, and it has one of those endings that makes you chuckle at your TV set, "Oh, no! I can't believe they went THERE!" The point that every predator can become someone's prey is crisply made with a NIGHT GALLERY-style finish, and has me looking forward to what Larry Cohen, (teamed hopefully again with Moriarty), will come up with next. Though hardly the best of the bunch, you can count on getting at least a little 'boost' from PICK ME UP. **1/2 out of **** stars.
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