TCM Underground is hitting it out of the park this month, and The Hidden is one of those, well, hidden gems that nobody seems to ever talk about when discussing sci-fi classics from the 80s. I haven’t figured out why The Hidden is always one of those “Oh yeah” movies.
Kyle MacLachlan plays FBI special agent Lloyd Gallagher on the hunt for a thrill killer who opens the movie with a stunning bank robbery. The thing is, the killer isn’t human. This killer is actually an alien bug who takes over the bodies of other humans and uses them to commit a crime spree until their body is used up, and then it transfers from body to body. (And, yes, this plot does sound like a trashy genre version of that show that is coming back in style).
The thing is, The Hidden is far better than it has any right to be. The pedigree of The Hidden isn’t exactly spectacular. Director Jack Sholder is best known for directing A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge and the 1982 cult slasher Alone in the Dark. Writer Jim Kouf (under the pseudonym Bob Hunt) is best known for co-writing Rush Hour and co-creating Grimm. And the plot is some brilliantly unholy intersection of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Terminator that interrogates our humanity through visceral experiences with a hint of the 80s alien paranoia from They Live.
But, good god, when the movie explodes, it plays like a shot of adrenaline. This is an alien who, after robbing a bank, pops in an I.R.S. Records punk cassette and leads everybody on an epic car chase. And that’s just the opening set piece. After that, the movie drops into a bizarro-world examination of what it means to be human by having aliens inhabit human bodies and try to get their kicks using human bodies and making them function at their limits.
The Hidden died in theaters, running up against the likes of John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, and the Whoopi Goldberg vehicle Fatal Beauty. Like this week’s Film on the Disc Intruder, The Hidden found a healthy cult following on VHS. I’ve even seen the movie play at art houses in 35mm, and the print is pristine (seriously, you need to see this movie in a theater if you can). The politics here do have a bit of 1980s retrograde sexism (its main female character is a stripper who doesn’t get more than a handful of lines), but its excellent execution overcomes its minor flaws.
The Hidden airs on Saturday Night/Sunday Morning at 2:45am EST on TCM.