The Hitchhiker: "Lovesounds"

"Kurt Hoffman thinks people exist for only one reason: to serve him. But even the mightiest sometimes see their subjects rebel,a nd the palace walls come tumbling down." The Hitchhiker

I remember being a boy in 1986 or 1987, when a weekend show called "Saturday Nightmares" aired on the USA cable network. It consisted of some horror movie bumpers, “Tonight’s Feature,” and a few shows that ran afterward—or maybe in some cases before—along with the occasional obscure student film or short subject. As you may have guessed, it was all fright-oriented fun on a Saturday night, preceded by "Sci-Fri Theater" the night before, at a time when television schlock fests were highly valued weekend rituals.

I remember one weekend they showed the utterly sickening David Cronenberg-directed grue-fest The Brood, starring Oliver Reed and the recently deceased Samantha Eggar, as well as episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" (a staple) and "The Hitchhiker." They also showed "The Ray Bradbury Theater" on occasion—or perhaps that was the night before. (Now that I think of it, that would make more sense.)

Saturday Nightmares Intro & Bumpers 1986

I haven’t been able to track down the Hitchcock episode they showed that night (the announcer seemed to have given the wrong title), but when I discovered that some great soul had uploaded, from an old VHS rip, the exact same commercial I remembered seeing nearly forty years ago to YouTube, I couldn’t resist going and making it “1987 Night,” watching both The Brood and the particular "Hitchhiker" episode with Klaus Kinski. It was almost like I was back in that tiny, healthy body, in the back room at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, where Mom and I lived for a time after my parents divorced. Such happy memories.

First off, though, I have to say that "The Hitchhiker," starring Page Fletcher as the unlikely horror host who looked, for all the world, more like a soap opera hunk than a Crypt Keeper, is one of the great, buried shows of all time. You want to talk about cult TV? So many famous faces—and so many faces that would go on to become famous—and so many great actors: Darren McGavin, Gary Busey, Margot Kidder, Miriam Cyr, Tom Skerritt, and that’s just to name a few—had appearances on the Canadian show. It pushed the outside of the envelope of what was permissible in sex and violence by dint of being first broadcast on Showtime before being shuffled to USA for an additional three seasons. I’ve virtually never seen an episode that disappointed—taut, sexy, techno-thrillers with a twist ending worthy of EC or even O. Henry. The evildoer always captured in their own web; the miscreant always snared, made to pay his comeuppance by a cosmic, terrible, but just and vengeful God.

Virtually nary a hint of the traditional supernatural tropes, either—although there were dark demons and noisy ghosts. "The Hitchhiker" revealed that the truest and worst horrors come not from monstrous creatures any more arcane or exotic than the man or woman looking in the mirror.

“Lovesounds,” an episode where the late and largely unlamented (at least by daughter Nastassja) Klaus Kinski is a composer—or music professor, or something—who lives in an opulent, architectural nightmare of a house with his bored, youngish wife (Belinda Bauer), a real looker whose nude body is exploited to the hilt in this episode.

Kinski has commissioned a 1984 obscenity of a computerized stereo system, put together by an ’80s TV hunk (Stephen Shellen) who takes a polite interest in Kinski’s wife. Alas, Kinski—a real and true bastard with a foul, imperial disposition and no sense of humor (which some claim was how he actually was)—finds himself embarrassed when his new, customized toy decides he is to be “Access Denied.” The hunky beau struggles to fix the problem, all the while snuggling up to the maestro’s hot young wife.

Access Denied. Access Denied. Again and again, it reads to Kinski’s increasing annoyance. Finally, they get the problem fixed, and the old monster is mollified, his face breaking into the craggy grin audiences and connoisseurs of the Kinski mystique came to know and love. He points his little rod (stop laughing) of a microphone at the lakefront boathouse. And what, pray tell, does this all-powerful mic pick up, you might well ask?

Love sounds, baby. As per the title of the episode. And in one of those twists—the computerized sound system, as per the techno-fear that God works through electronic devices that were just beginning to have the first stirrings, in that primitive era, of what they would later become—torments him, leading to a conclusion I won’t quite give away, except to say it’s worthy of a grim fairy tale.

Outro: Page Fletcher’s closing monologue, the coda. The Devil gets his due. The curtain closes. And sounds—whether they be those of love, hate, or absolute indifference—are silenced.

Until next weekend, that is.

Ciao, baby.

My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1.

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My book: Silent Scream! : Nosferatu. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels. (Writing as C. Augustine)

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