Hey, I understand we all gotta start somewhere. It’s just unfortunate Josie Bissett had to start her career not with TV’s hit Melrose Place, but a few years earlier with Umberto Lenzi’s Hitcher in the Dark. I’m guessing the movie is one she’d rather go unseen … and now that I’ve seen it, I understand that, too.

Angry at catching her jock boyfriend (Jason Saucier of producer Joe D’Amato’s Top Model) for flirting with another woman, Bissett’s Daniela ditches their campsite to return home. She happily accepts a ride to the bus station from the boyish Mark (Joe Balogh of Lenzi’s Black Demons) and his comically large Winnebago. En route, he offers her a Coca-Cola with Rohypnol — I believe it was branded “New Coke” back then — and she blacks out, eventually coming to handcuffed in the RV’s bedroom.

A less likable Christopher Atkins with T-shirts tucked snugly into belted khakis, Balogh’s Mark intends on keeping Daniela captive, because she reminds him of his beloved dead mother. To feed his own delusion, he takes scissors to his prisoner’s hair, making Daniela look like Mom — or, judging by Bissett’s terrible wig, Mary Martin in the 1954 Broadway musical production of Peter Pan. He does this as she sleeps, which is the state she’s in when he shoots nude Polaroids — an act icky on its own, but unintentionally more unpleasant since Bissett, although of legal age, looks to be about 15.

Tiresome when it should titillate, the broad-daylight film lazily trips on the low bar of being a cheap, enjoyable Italian rip-off of 1986’s crazy-popular cable staple The Hitcher. Mostly taking place inside the RV, Hitcher in the Dark is essentially a two-hander, which would be fine if either actor exhibited a kung-fu grip. It’s not that old pro Lenzi had completely lost his touch, since the same year gave us Nightmare Beach, which is nothing but fun.

The most engaging part of Dark is hearing the dated line, “Hey, who do you think are, Mickey Rourke?” and reading all the oddly named (and inconsistently capitalized) characters in the closing credits: to wit, “Big man store,” “Toyota’s woman,” “1 Greaser” and “2 Greaser.” —Rod Lott

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In Drive All Night, cabbie Dave (Yutaka Takeuchi, Battleship) does just that. This taxi driver is no Taxi Driver wishing a real rain to come and wash all the scum off the streets; he’s smart and sweet — a Travis Butterbrickle, if you will.

His passenger for the entire evening is Cara (Lexy Hammonds, 2017’s Escape Room — not the famous one), a young and semi-bratty woman with reserves of Mortal Kombat II trivia, a “We All Die Someday” tattoo and a duffel bag — here called just “duffel,” which is more enigmatic than its unknown contents. As she makes Dave chauffeur her around town for hours and hours, from arcade and café to motel, she’s being followed by a big, bad, bald dude (Johnny Gilligan, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus) who looks ready to attend a Halloween party as Ryan Gosling in Drive.

Certainly that’s not accidental, as Peter Hsieh’s debut feature arrives gorgeously soaked in the neon-hellhole California ambience of Nicolas Winding Refn’s work (notably Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon) with accompanying mood for days — er, nights). Absorbing a director’s color palette is a relatively easy task, which Hsieh pulls off, no doubt with the help of feature-debuting DP William Hellmuth.

But to also attempt David Lynch-branded surrealism is a too-tall order, especially on one’s first try; just being weird and cryptic isn’t enough. For example, a mysterious torch singer named Midnight Judy (Natalia Berger) is rumored to be a vampire, but her inclusion assumedly seems only to serve a desire to pay homage to the Club Silencio sequence from Lynch’s masterpiece, Mullholland Drive. While Berger’s slinky appearance is sure to satisfy opera-glove fetishists, her dreamlike showcase is out of the filmmaker’s ambitious reach.

Or perhaps Midnight Judy’s purpose might be due to Drive All Night’s bones simply not bearing enough meat to merit a full-length movie. Veering from his strong suit of shot composition, Hsieh’s workarounds include box-turtle pacing and dosing each performance with Dramamine. The effect is like a napping actor waking mid-scene and suddenly realizing his or her line is up — or was:

Cara: “I like you.”
[7-second pause]
Dave: “I like you, too.”

Cara: “You afraid of dying?”
[13-second pause]
Dave: “I try not to think about it.”

One wonders if all that somniferous dead air were in Hsieh’s script. Takeuchi’s built-in affability survives this curious touch; the overall vibe does not.

Hammonds comes off too young to play her Manic Pixie Dream Fare with believability; switching roles with the more experienced Sarah Dumont (Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) as a late-night waitress who catches Dave’s eye (and vice versa) would benefit both actresses and the simple story. Another would be to give more scenes for comic-relief cabbie Will Springhorn to steal with his amusing character’s sleazy braggadocio. Whenever Springhorn ambles in, which is not enough, he alights the screen; the rest of the film rarely works up such a spark — not for any considerable stretch and definitely not All Night. —Rod Lott

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