The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker (2023) – Suh-mash

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 10th January
Seen: 2nd September

In February of 2013, Caleb Lawrence McGillvary was hitchhiking. One of the people who gave him a ride turned out to be Jett Simmons McBride who, with Caleb in his passenger seat, drove his car into a utility truck and pinned a worker between his vehicle and the truck. When a woman came over to help, Jett tried to pull her away while proclaiming himself to be Jesus Christ and shouting racial slurs about the man who he had just hit with his vehicle. This is when Caleb sprung into action with a hatchet he had in his bag, hitting Jett 3 times in the head which got him to release the young woman and incapacitated him until the police came. When interviewed about this, Caleb would insist on being called Kai and described his moment of defense with the onomatopoeic phrase “Smash, Smash, Suh-mash” which would go on to become a meme and earn Kai the label “Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker”. 

By May of that same year, Kai would be arrested for the murder of New Jersey attorney Joseph Galfy and eventually be sentenced to over 5 decades in prison. 

The documentary The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker details this story in all its absolutely insane glory from the strange incident that brought Kai to worldwide attention to the instant fame he attained which included appearances on the Jimmy Kimmel show and potential collabs with Justin Bieber to his eventual trial and incarceration. Made up of interviews with Kai’s family, the police investigators, journalists, and others who interacted with Kai at some point during his 3 months of fame, The Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker provides a careful timeline that looks beyond the meme that captured the internet’s full attention for that brief period a decade ago.

For the record, Kai has come out and said that The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker is an exploitative piece because Netflix didn’t interview or pay him for his work, which might be true (Netflix doesn’t seem to like paying anyone for their work, just ask the writers and actors on strike right now) but to defend the documentary just a little bit they do a fairly good job of explaining Kai’s story. Indeed, a lot of the time they use clips of Kai himself telling the stories of what happened (both talking about the original incident and the murder) so even without interviewing him, Kai’s words do get to be a part of this story.

This story is largely about two big elements and the first is just about how quickly someone can rise to fame when they aren’t prepared for it and the damage that can do. Through the stories of the people who were there with Kai as he became one of the biggest figures around, you get the sense of someone who was not ready for any of this and didn’t have the ability to handle it. You see how Kai is regularly thrown into situations he’s not in any way mentally healthy enough to handle, the footage from an interview with Jimmy Kimmel particularly feels uncomfortable because it’s clear that Kai needed mental help that no one was going to get him, which might factor in somewhat to what came later.

The second element is trauma, specifically Kai’s traumatic life which appears to have given him a hair trigger in regards to anger. The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker talks to several people who detail some pretty painful things that Kai claims happened to him and each time it’s accompanied by how that seems to have made him particularly emotional around abuse (it’s noted that his famous meme moment happened because he saw someone being harmed in some way). It also goes into detail on the darker elements of his personality, things he said that may suggest darker impulses that we never get to be clear on. It’s somewhat vague if this is Kai putting on an act or a real trauma response, and that makes for an interesting conversation.

A huge thankyou to the people who made The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker for just making a film instead of what Netflix seems to love more than anything, a four-part docuseries. You can almost feel where this film could’ve been cut up into separate episodes of a series and expanded on with even more extraneous details like so many other docuseries on Netflix so for this film to have the self-control to stick to a simple hour and a half is commendable. They don’t overstay their welcome and just deliver the simple story of a guy who had 15 minutes of meme-induced fame that went horribly, horribly wrong.

The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker is a simple and effective documentary that interestingly examines a strange figure from modern internet history in a way that’s entertaining and informative. Sure it might’ve been made better with an actual interview with the subject but without that, it still works pretty well. It asks some tough questions about how people deal with fame and how we react to people based on limited knowledge but never pushes too far in any direction. It’s a “Just the facts, ma’am” kind of film, mostly because the facts of this story are weird enough to be engaging. Sometimes you need a film to just coast by on the bare minimum, this does the job well.