You might not have heard of it, it's pretty obscure

THE HIDDEN

1987

Directed by Jack Sholder

Written by Jim Kouf and Jack Sholder

Spoilers: moderate

Back when we were talking about the Nightmares On Elm Street, I remarked that while they (by which I mean the original series, that is, the first six) were made by people who did not necessarily have tremendously robust resumes at the time they did their first Nightmare, which was sometimes their first movie, period, virtually every last one of them found themselves boosted by the franchise into a visible filmmaking career—in the case of Wes Craven, Chuck Russell, Renny Harlin, and Stephen Hopkins, very visible filmmaking careers, and even Rachel Talalay has Tank Girl—and the exception was the director of Nightmare's very first sequel, Freddy's Revenge, a certain Jack Sholder, and we may now ask: was that right?  Sholder maintained a career, but even the career he had wasn't all that long or productive, and he never achieved so much as Tank Girl-sized notoriety.  Even at the time, however, I expressed some curiosity about the next movie he directed, that, naturally, has never risen too far above the pop cultural waterline—going by Letterboxd views, the film to which it's most often compared, The Terminator, has been seen by more than thirty times as many people; even taking a movie in the same league, Russell's post-Nightmare follow-up, his remake of The Blob, has been seen by three times as many—but, even so, it also feels like everyone who has seen it has liked it, while even upon its release in 1987, it achieved relatively complimentary reviews, and I suppose must've turned some kind of a profit, or, at least, somebody must've thought it made enough of an impression to put out a direct-to-video sequel more than six years later, but then, that's not the kind of thing that suggests a real hit.  Yet I have a bit of a sense that with Freddy's Revenge's steady rehabilitation over the decades—for it's been a long time since Sholder's sequel was considered that franchise's worst—the Sholder movie that wasn't even really outright rejected at the time, but simply managed to get overlooked and forgotten, has, itself, been increasingly rediscovered.

As it turns out, that movie, The Hidden, deserves all the rediscovery it could possibly get; it's an outstanding, not-even-so-little horror thriller that Sholder got New Line Cinema to produce for him as his reward, or whatever, for at least proving Craven's nightmare could franchise.  It originated from a fellow named Jim Kouf (credited here as "Bob Hunt" because that appears to have been his shame name for his horror screenplays, going by his credit on 1981's The Boogens), who has had a successful, if maybe not august, screenwriting career, and if you were to name an action-comedy programmer from around the turn of the millennium, he may well have had a hand in it, though his most recent screenplay, which may turn out to be the septuagenarian's final one, would serve as a nice career capstone, or at least I personally thought Money Monster was a damned fine and substantive thriller; Kouf, anyway, wrote The Hidden with an eye towards directing it as an undemanding genre debut, and when this ambition was stymied, he essentially abandoned it to its purchasers, wholly unconcerned with the fate of a script that, after all, didn't even bear his name.  Sholder, on the other hand, saw real potential in it.  For what it's worth, The Hidden seems to be his favorite of his own movies, and that's fair enough, for as it was put into production, he rewrote Kouf's script himself, uncredited, either only adding a bit more nuanced character interplay or, since false modesty could come into this, just fully reworking it altogether, yet either way, doing so without betraying Kouf's streamlined vision for horror-based action thrills, simply ensuring some personality emerged out of it.  Now, this also means I harbor some suspicions that Sholder's the one responsible for the ending to his film, that paradoxically comes off both gutless and like it's oblivious to its own horror, but let's save it, as I've heard it told that a horse should usually precede a cart.

So: in what sure seems like an title sequence of unusual confidence—"seems" being what matters, even if I know, because Sholder said so, that it was a pick-up sequence done under serious budgetary pressure from New Line, that's a single take on a security camera only because that was the cheapest way to do it; but it's pulled off wonderfully—the opening credits play out over that black-and-white, gruesomely-pixelated CCTV footage of a bank, eventually robbed with much bloodshed, and likewise let us ignore the insane chintziness of the title logo and its hollowed-out glyphs incorporating footage from, presumably, later in the film, because to dwell on its ugliness would interrupt our flow.  Cut to color 35mm as the hoodlum (Chris Mulkey) leaves the bank, and hops into his Lambo, setting off a merry chase with the LAPD that's clearly benefiting from some exceptionally solid second unit direction (potentially John R. Woodward, though the credits make it hard to tell), and into which Sholder and editor Michael N. Knue drop frequent cut-backs to Mulkey making all these displays of pure smug dipshit amusement at the situation he's gotten himself into, while the sound works on your nerves in its own way, as we simultaneously cut in and out from the killer's personal soundtrack of the stinkiest 80s rock (do I like it? you bet, and in the mixing being annoying on purpose, it even manages to circumvent my usual irritation with movies that anchor their soundtracks this firmly to the diegesis).  Ultimately, homicide detective Tom Beck (Michael Nouri) establishes an impassable roadblock—the killer only speeds up—and finally, at the cost of more vehicular mayhem, and with questionable police ethics, they blow the perp to smithereens as he exits his vehicle, already riddled with bullets, yet still adorned with his insufferable shit-eating grin.

That's a great opening—weird but in the most muscular and exciting way, and clearly giving New Line an excuse to flex their burgeoning finances too (I mean, I guess they really did fuck up that Lamborghini, huh?)—but even weirder, the guy isn't even dead yet, though we'll understand exactly how weird this is getting long before poor Sgt. Beck does.  In the meantime, back at the office, Beck is imposed upon by FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher (Kyle MacLachlan), in pursuit of the man the LAPD just put into the hospital and who isn't expected to survive, and Gallagher comes off pretty strange and even uncanny himself, but for all we or Beck know that's just because he's being played by Kyle MacLachlan.  But while Beck tries to rid himself of Gallagher and close this inexplicable case of what seems to be a regular solid citizen snapping and going on a violent crime spree, we're made privy to what's really happening in that hospital: the killer's maw yawning open so as to vomit out the enormous, wormlike parasite who's been riding him, doing so directly into his only half-dead suitemate's (William Boyett's) own mouth.  And soon enough, Beck's got even more corpses on his hands, and somehow several more solid citizens snapping and going on violent crime sprees, plus this annoying FBI agent who keeps showing up to the murder scenes before he does, possibly as a result of the Porsche that the junior G-man's racing all over town, and nonchalantly "jokes" is stolen, but also as if he might know something Beck does not, which, of course, he absolutely does.

In a sense, The Hidden is basically just a web of threadbare science fiction mystery to justify enough pursuit scenes before the secret can come out, neatly putting two first acts out in front of a third, and thereby making for a 97 minute feature presentation; but that's a dreary way to approach anything and Sholder's certainly distracting you well enough from its mechanics, giving us both an awfully snappily-built 97 minutes and demonstrating a good sense of how to dwell within that mystery even after it's already shown itself to us.  That first thing is probably the more widely-shared opinion, and while I think that if I had to pick the movie's best sequence, it'd still be its very first, when we still have no idea what's going on at all, the rest is pretty close to as good, with a lot of taut "cops bust down doors, point guns" suspense across an array of locations chasing what, to Beck's surprise, turns out to be a creature with as many faces as it can steal, with the Strawns, C.J. and Mick, who were about to rock my personal world the following year with A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, managing some terrifically lived-in production design of police stations (actually the long-disused Jefferson Heights jail) and mannequin factories in tandem with some pretty swell location management of a decisively-unglamorous late-80s L.A., tied together with ex-Nightmare DP Jacques Haitkin (New Line in its early days can feel like a Golden Age studio with all the company men and women's names consistently coming up) doing some fine work especially with gritty, unpleasant sunshine in the exteriors, insisting on reality even with the overt push towards green fluorescences in the interiors that still helps give the whole affair its off-balanced, if not otherworldly cast.

The second assertion about how well it handles sci-fi mystery, is, I'd expect, more a matter of taste: this is a movie that gives its primary game away very early, in what amounts to an aside to the audience—it is also one of only two deployments throughout the entire film of Kevin Yeagher's extraordinarily disgusting creature/effects makeup regarding the bug (I am almost never actually grossed out by horror movie effects, but rarely-glimpsed or not, this tentacled motherfucker, flailing out of and back into somebody's mouth, turned my stomach for real), and it is also the best deployment, so the movie's single most potent moment is burned off in, like, the first twenty minutes—but I think it mostly works anyhow.  (Oh, sure, we'd all have liked to have seen more of the bug—at least the part where it cunningly takes refuge in a dog, The Thing-style!—but we're obviously not talking about a hugely expensive movie, and it already looks more expensive than it was.)  As for how it works, then, it's because we're yoked to Beck's perspective but with a great deal more awareness, so it's a nice exercise in an almost Lovecraftian sort of progression, where we wait for the protagonist to finally move beyond rationalism and accept the obvious but absolutely unbelievable horrifying truth; meanwhile, it's given half its game away, but not all of it, and while the secondary mystery is pretty easily-guessed, so easily I'm sure you have guessed it and I wasn't even being as blatant as the movie is about it, it doesn't confirm your suspicions till very late in the day and there was still some wriggle room for how exactly it was going to do so.

Now, it's not flawless, by any means: it's almost invariably better at the pursuit part of action-pursuit than the action part, and while it definitely has a concept for its action, the execution of that concept can, for one thing, start beggaring belief—the human hosts clearly have their adrenaline unlocked and the commanding parasite is obviously unworried about injury if it can feel its hosts' pain at all, but damn does this movie underestimate the mechanical damage a bullet does, or simply how much blood a human body requires, and when it turns out a bullet to the head does work you start wondering why amidst the many magazines expended in the film only the one single round ever finds purchase in the enemy's skull—but since that kind of goopy firefight is exactly what you've come to see in an 80s horror Body Snatchers riff, the actual problem is that its gunplay is sometimes rendered a little awkward, and constructed far more than it benefits from out of squib insert shots, possibly not even as many squib insert shots that were actually filmed as still wind up in the movie anyway, which is a special case of the issues with Knue's editing, which is having some noticeable, if not really film-breaking, trouble with continuity pretty much the entire time.

But it moves like greased lightning regardless (the single laggiest part comes early on, and involves the evil entity's more-complicated-than-it-needs-to-be quest to acquire a new luxury sports car, which is funny, being a foregone conclusion and all, but the movie is clearly shedding momentum from it), though I haven't really explained why it feels electrifying, and that's just how Sholder lets his premise be his premise.  There's a lot of movies The Hidden gets compared to, I think more as a matter of selling it, but it's not really like The Terminator except in terms of basic genre and budgetary level (and I imagine because this also has a shootout in a police station), and it's not really like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and while tonally I'd say it overlaps with They Live, on occasion, it's more like it has a Carpenteresque feel than it's like that or The Thing.  You know what movie it kept reminding me of?  The Brain From Planet Arous, a comparison that gets more concrete eventually (it wouldn't shock me to learn that Kouf actively patterned it on that B-minus-movie classic-of-classics), but even early on, because of the very specific kind of fun it's having.  The entity in this movie isn't even really an invader, it's practically a fucking tourist, treating our Earth far more like a video game or live-action cartoon than a target of conquest, a place to enjoy by way of fucking it up for everyone who already lives here, and doing so sloppily and by means of impulses from an id that's not necessarily so alien as we'd like; The Hidden essentially posits a body-snatching parasite from beyond the stars that turns its victims not into determined pod people working in furtherance of a master plan, but into 80s assholes, reveling in the full spectrum of antisocial behavior, from shooting people for the hell of it to merely playing bad music loudly in a public place.

It's fantastically unique in this respect, and enjoys some deliriously playful performances from the several bodies the entity wears over the course of the film, Mulkey being especially John Agar-like in his leering despicability and William Boyett's dyspeptic, physically-failing middle-aged man laying out more-or-less the exact pattern for Vincent D'Onfrio in Men In Black, to the point I'm wondering if I should think less of that performance now; Claudia Christian is probably giving the least interesting of the alien-possessed performances, including the dog (which isn't the slam it sounds like, it's a superb evil dog), and through no special fault of her own (the thigh-highs her character obligatorily wears are badly constraining her ability to walk, let alone walk "alien"), but her character gets a likeable grace note (fucking a victim to death) and I guess if you ever wanted to see how Cmdr. Ivanova would do in a wet T-shirt contest, The Hidden's got you covered.  Ultimately, the blind chaos that's apparently the entity's only M.O. even makes the movie's third-act turn, despite being set up early (and blaringly), wind up a surprise after all.

And the protagonists' side is finely-balanced against the villain's actors' collective, Nouri reportedly being a handful for Sholder on set, but I don't think the director's exasperation is remotely noticeable in the finished film (in fact, probably my favorite pieces of direction in the whole movie involve MacLachlan getting blocked around Nouri to continually emerge from doorways, corners, and foreground occlusions to bug our hero, which going by what Sholder's indicated, Nouri seems to have had more say in than he ought to have had, but you can't argue with results).  Nouri's good, anyway, even if I'm a little surprised he took such an interest especially when he didn't even want to be there and the role is going to unavoidably get overshadowed; but he's good, specifically, at playing straight-man to MacLachlan.  MacLachlan is amazing, though: cool and effortlessly reflecting all the condescension Nouri's throwing at him in a register of semi-faux-innocence, playing Gallagher as infinitely patient with a stupid new pal, even self-amused, despite his entire program being a heedless urgency, but always "off" in rather indefinable ways, at least until those ways start adding up.  It's a pretty great buddy cop dynamic that might not have categorically required a sci-fi plot to be a good time (though it obviously helps), and even when the movie does need to downshift, it's got that central dynamic to cover for it.

But I did imply it lacks a good ending, which would be going too far (hell, once we get to the third act it even solves a gnawing minor distraction regarding why the entity hasn't been boxed up ages ago, and if it remains dubious, the way it closes its apparent plot hole is still pretty memorable).  The climax itself is fine, though The Hidden would be edging into "unheralded 80s sci-fi masterpiece territory" if it had ended five minutes earlier and tacked as hard into its nihilistic reversal as it sure seems like it wants to (ah, Chekhov's flamethrower), and the denouement, bizarre and off-putting and logistically-implausible as it is, should have at least been completely upsetting and not mediated by a bullshit, Spielbergian optical effect ("he's a different species"—oh please), but then, I've already mentioned that Yeagher's creature effects don't get to satisfy the rule of threes.  Still, a slightly deflating last few minutes is a small price to pay for such an exceptional addition to the 1980s' canon of weird, awesome sci-fi horror.

Score: 8/10