NOTE: The below Blu-ray and 4K UHD captures were taken directly from the respective disc.

ADDITION: Indicator 4K UHD (September 2026): Indicator have transferred Pasquale Festa Campanile's Hitch-Hike (aka 'Autostop rosso sangue') to Blu-ray and 4K UHD. Powerhouse have gone back to the original negative for their brand-new 4K HDR restoration executed in-house, presented at 2160P in Dolby Vision with HDR10 compatibility - a world premiere for the film on the format, and part of the label's continuing move toward doing its own restoration work rather than licensing masters from rights holders. Both discs carries two presentations: Hitch-Hike, the English-language version, and Autostop rosso sangue, the Italian. These are in a branched structure, and the difference extends past titles and credits and into the cut itself. HDR earns its keep: the photography by Giuseppe Ruzzolini (My Name Is Nobody, The Nun and the Devil, What?, Duck, You Sucker!) and Franco Di Giacomo (cameraman on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), is built on the collision between dark, cramped vehicle interiors and blazing indifferent exteriors, which is precisely the contrast that high dynamic range exists to hold together rather than forcing a choice between crushed shadow and blown highlight. We compared the Blue Underground's 2002 DVD, 88 Films 2015 Region 'B' Blu-ray and Raro's 2016 Region FREE Blu-ray of Hitch-Hike HERE. The 2160P Dolby Vision presentation delivers noticeably improved fine detail in textures, and clothing over the BD and ancient DVD. It looks surprisingly bright and crisp on 4K UHD. Impressively even without losing the rough-hewn edges.

It is likely that the monitor you are seeing this review is not an HDR-compatible display (High Dynamic Range) or Dolby Vision, where each pixel can be assigned with a wider and notably granular range of color and light. Our capture software if simulating the HDR (in a uniform manner) for standard monitors. This should make it easier for us to review more 4K UHD titles in the future and give you a decent idea of its attributes on your system. So our captures may not support the exact same colors (coolness of skin tones, brighter or darker hues etc.) as the 4K system at your home. But the framing, detail, grain texture support etc. are, generally, not effected by this simulation representation.

NOTE: We have added 50 more large resolution 4K UHD captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray and 4K UHD, original mono accompanies both versions, and the situation is more interesting than "original language versus DUB" suggests. Italian production of the period was post-synchronized in its entirety, and this was a genuinely international cast - an Italian lead, a French co-star, an American antagonist - meaning the actors very likely performed in three different languages on set with everything constructed afterward. Neither track, on that reading, is the authentic one; both are reconstructions, and the choice between them is a real aesthetic decision rather than a question of purity. Nero and Hess are the ones to listen to closely, since both had form for DUB'ing themselves. Morricone (The Key, For a Few Dollars More, A Fistful of Dollars, Violent City, Grand Slam Revolver, The Great Silence, Who Saw Her Die?, The Black Belly of the Tarantula, The Fifth Cord, Luna, Danger Diabolik, Two Mules For Sister Sara, A Bullet for the General, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, The French Conspiracy, U Turn, Stay As You Are, Short Night of Glass Dolls,) supplies a loose, ambling guitar theme - warm, unhurried, essentially pastoral - and lets it play over material it has no business accompanying. It is not ironic in the winking sense; it is worse than that, because it never acknowledges the film at all. It simply insists that this is a pleasant drive through open country, and keeps insisting while the picture disproves it. Genre commentators have called it among the finest things Morricone wrote outside his work for Leone, and the comparison is apt in the specific sense that Leone taught him how much a score can refuse to do. The same restraint is at work here, pointed at a much uglier target. Indicator offer optional English or English (SDH) subtitles on their Region FREE Blu-ray and Region FREE 4K UHD. 

The 4K UHD and Blu-ray offer many extras. This is an extraordinary package by any measure - roughly three hours and forty-eight minutes of video supplements before the commentary, which against a 104-minute feature means something over five and a half hours of accompanying material. The commentary pairs Eugenio Ercolani (Darkening the Italian Screen: Interviews with Genre and Exploitation Directors Who Debuted in the 1950s and 1960s) and Marcus Stiglegger, an Italian genre specialist and a German film scholar respectively, which promises something more analytical than the usual affectionate trivia. The centerpiece is Federico Caddeo's Road to Ruin, a newly updated feature-length documentary running nearly as long as the film, with Franco Nero, Corinne Cléry, David Hess and assistant director Neri Parenti (Fracchia Vs. Dracula) - and one point of clarification worth making for readers: Hess died in 2011, so his contributions here are necessarily archival, very likely drawn from and expanded upon the 2002 featurette The Devil Thumbs a Ride (17:38) also carried on the disc. Parenti's presence is the sleeper pleasure, since the assistant director on this thoroughly unpleasant thriller went on to direct the Fantozzi comedies - another of the film's odd comedy connections, echoing Festa Campanile's own career - and he gets a further 25 minutes to himself in Adventures in Abruzzo. Ercolani supplies The Novelist's Revenge (25-minutes) on Festa Campanile's wider career, its title nodding at the director's own work as a novelist (Buon Natale, Buon Anno,) and, more substantially, The Coldest of Dishes, an hour-long study of the Italian rape-revenge cycle. That last inclusion deserves particular credit: it is the label confronting the film's most contested element directly and at length rather than releasing the picture and hoping nobody raises it. Four trailers and an, obligatory, image gallery round out the disc, and the limited edition adds an 80-page book with a new essay by Mikel J. Koven - author of La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film, the standard academic study of the giallo - an archival Andrea Pergolari (La commedia Italiana in 160 films 1948-1980) interview on Festa Campanile, and archival extracts from co-writer Ottavio Jemma (A Lizard in a Woman's Skin,) Morricone, and the three leads. The edition is 5,000 individually numbered units for the UK, split 4,000 UHD to 1,000 Blu-ray.

Pasquale Festa Campanile’s Hitch-Hike 4K UHD is a comprehensive, seriously argued edition of a film that has spent fifty years filed under disposable Eurosleaze, and Indicator have treated it as warranting an hour of scholarship on the subgenre it belongs to, commentary, a feature-length production history, and an 80-page book and more. Whether Hitch-Hike can bear that weight is a fair question - it is a nasty picture with a real idea inside it and a serious unresolved problem at its center - but the case for taking it seriously has never been put this thoroughly, and the below-the-line pedigree alone (two Leone-trained cinematographers, Morricone at something near his best outside Leone) makes the argument worth hearing. The restoration is the label's own work from the negative, and the two-version presentation settles a question that has dogged the film's home video history. Set against the sort of release that ships difficult material with no context at all, this is what it looks like when a real label does the work that fans appreciate. Genre favorite Franco Nero (The Visitor, Texas, Adios, The Mercenary, A Quiet Place in the Country, The Day of the Owl, The Case is Closed, Forget It, How to Kill a Judge, Hitch-Hike, Keoma, The Fifth Cord, Enter the Ninja, Camelot, War of the Planets, Massacre Time, The Witch, Querelle, The Salamander, 21 Hours at Munich, Nymph,) came to Hitch-Hike at the height of a career built on competence and cool: Django, the fixed stare, the man who handles himself. Festa Campanile casts him and then systematically removes every quality that persona rests on. Walter is a journalist who drinks, who owes his job to his father-in-law, who lives on his wife's family money and punishes her nightly for it. Corinne Cléry (The Devil's Honey, Plot of Fear,) had come off The Story of O two years earlier and would go on to a Bond film (Moonraker,) and her casting brings the expectation of a certain kind of role - the beautiful woman things happen to. She plays against it hard. Eve is the most intelligent person in the vehicle and knows it; her weapon is verbal precision, deployed with the accuracy of someone who has had years of practice finding the exact sentence that will land. David Hess (The House on the Edge of the Park, The Swiss Conspiracy) arrives trailing The Last House on the Left, and the film banks on that recognition - we know what he is within seconds, which frees Festa Campanile from having to establish it and lets him spend the running time on the couple instead. But Hess does more than repeat himself. Konitz is playful, watchful, almost sociable; he enjoys the Mancinis, reads their marriage faster than either of them would like, and works the fault line between them for entertainment as much as advantage. The debt to Peckinpah is heavy and acknowledged - Straw Dogs most obviously, The Getaway and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia in the texture - and it extends to the flaw. In all of these films, sexual violence functions structurally as an assault on male authority rather than on female safety; the woman's suffering is the instrument by which a man's standing is measured. Hitch-Hike inherits that architecture without inheriting Peckinpah's uneasy self-awareness about it. What it does have, and what partly redeems it, is the willingness to follow the logic all the way down. Craft-wise it is better than its reputation. Franco di Giacomo and Giuseppe Ruzzolini shoot the interiors for claustrophobia and the exteriors for indifference, and the Gran Sasso mountains of Abruzzo stand in for Northern California more convincingly than they have any right to. The truck sequence is a straight lift from Duel and knows it. And Morricone contributes a score that may be the film's single best decision - a loose, sunlit guitar theme that keeps insisting this is a pleasant drive through open country, playing over material that is nothing of the kind. It is the same irony the film is built on, and the only place the film executes it without ambivalence. Indicator's 4K UHD is an absolute keeper for me. The film - initially shocking - has grown on me with it's awkwardness and unapologetic sexual bents. A solid, stacked, release I'm glad I finally got around to reviewing.

Gary Tooze