Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker’ on Netflix, Where A Guy Goes Viral As A Hero Before Going To Prison As A Murderer

In The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker (Netflix), director Colette Camden recounts the rise and fall of “Kai,” an unhoused young man whose spontaneous moment of heroism and inherently quirky personality brought him widespread social media fame before he surfaced a few months later as the prime suspect in a brutal murder.      

THE HATCHET WIELDING HITCHHIKER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: “This dude that I introduced the world to went, in a matter of three months, from this amazing, beautiful, heroic person to wanted by authorities for murder.” As television news reporter Jessob Reisbeck tells it in The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker, his on-the-spot interview with a man known as Kai in the aftermath of a chaotic February 2013 traffic accident in Fresno, California set off a chain of events that launched the unhoused individual to viral fame, found him happy to indulge in that attention while still maintaining his nomadic lifestyle, and contributed in part to Kai’s ultimate conviction for the May 2013 murder of a 73-year-old man in New Jersey, a crime for which the man whose real name is Caleb Lawrence McGillvary is now serving a 57-year prison sentence. 

Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker spends much of its relatively brief run time rebuilding the ramp to Kai’s viral celebrity. When the man who picked him up rammed a pedestrian in a racially motivated attack and then attacked people trying to help, the hitchhiker leapt into action, and YouTube ate up his account of the incident. “I ran up behind him with a hatchet and “smash, smash, suh-MASH!” Kai’s interview with Reisbeck inspired memes, impromptu songs, and voluminous social media chatter, and soon enough Hollywood was calling, which led to an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and reality television offers. Kai was erratic and unpredictable but also carefree and endearingly loopy, a spontaneously born media personality. “There wasn’t anything about him at that point that would caution you against it,” says Brad Mulcahy of the Kimmel show.     

But things turn grim. Three months after his viral surge, Kai was linked to the death of a New Jersey attorney, tracked through his thriving social media presence, and eventually arrested and charged with the man’s murder. Convicted despite his claims of rape and self-defense, the people Kai encountered during his proverbial fifteen minutes of fame are left to wonder if their endorsements and encouragements contributed to his rapid transformation from a hitchhiking nomadic hero into an infamous killer with prison as his permanent address.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Netflix must have an entire office wing devoted to unearthing new takes on true crime stories. Just as Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker is more about the personality and viral spectacle that connects two acts of violence, it also features The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist, where the teenage LA thieves whose exploits became a movie tell their story, as well as Killer Sally, about the the circumstances surrounding a bodybuilder’s 1995 murder of her husband. 

Performance Worth Watching: It’s interesting to hear the perspective of Lisa Samsky and Brad Mulcahy in Hatchet, two former Hollywood insiders whose respective work as a reality TV brand manager and Jimmy Kimmel Live! researcher brought them into direct contact with Kai in the weeks after his viral breakout. Did his behavior make them uneasy? At times. Did his sudden celebrity also signal a potential revenue stream? No doubt.  

Memorable Dialogue: Mulcahy is philosophical about his part in the saga of Kai. “For most people, what they know of him is something maybe we wanna be. Maybe many of us don’t want the responsibilities we have, the bills and the cars and the insurance and the property taxes, and this guy was living that life without the responsibilities, and it was going well. And then…it didn’t.”

Sex and Skin: Really nothing here, other than footage of Kai unzipping and marking his territory in various Hollywood locales. (Take that, Walk of Fame star of Julio Iglesias.)

Our Take: Our culture is nowadays populated with viral moments, and the fleeting bits of notoriety they inspire. Remember the dude who sang Fleetwood Mac while stoned and skateboarding? The deep-voiced guy who sang “Chocolate Rain”? What about “Leave Britney alone!”, a YouTube clip that’s actually referenced in The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker as an example of this entirely normalized phenomenon? Like Kai, most of these moments found their way into the Kimmel show universe, which has become a populist clearinghouse for the novelty they represent. Because ultimately they are a novelty, the sort of wide format laugher that populates the socials before filtering into traditional media. But while the Fleetwood Mac skateboarder was popped for possession, it’s not like he murdered a guy. What Hatchet feels most interested in is how the forces at work in viral fame can become insidious, or a propellant that fuels an inferno, whether or not that was ever the intention of the social media tumult. Even Kai’s mother Shirley, who still refers to him by his given name but has never visited him in prison, seems to blame these forces for her son’s plight. “He was trusting the wrong people,” she says in Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker, which informs the doc’s central thrust not as a sad bit of true crime but as a cautionary tale against the cycle of chewing up and spitting out the everyday people who find that they’ve become a trending topic.   

Our Call: STREAM IT. Violent acts become bookends in The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker. But in between is what amounts to a cautionary tale about runaway viral fame and its tendency to promote, distort, and otherwise warp the narrative in our social media-addled culture. As one online commenter posts in the wake of Kai’s murder conviction, “fame is a double-edged hatchet.” 

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges