A hidden masterpiece (The Hidden (DVD))

Member Name: moronboy

Product:	The Hidden (DVD)
Date:	30/11/00 (155 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fast funny and ruthless

Disadvantages: None

A marvellous little movie, Jack Sholder's 'The Hidden' is one of the most imaginative and certainly one of the most entertaining alien movies ever made. Beginning with an attention-grabbing set-piece (ordinary guy rips off store with shock violence), the film rapidly changes up a gear for a razor sharp car chase. Whenever you see a nurse pushing a guy in a wheelchair in a scene such as this, you know for certain that the speeding villain will only just miss him - and when the speeding villain sends the wheelchair flying, you know you're not in Kansas anymore.

One after another, ordinary men go absolutely wild and start committing acts of random violence - theft, murder, wanton destruction - until they are killed, and killing them is a hard job. Cop on the case Michael Nouri is up to his neck when weirdo FBI man Kyle MacLachlan is assigned to help out, and swiftly reveals that each man is merely the host for an sociopathic alien parasite in town to have some laughs. If Nouri's plate wasn't already pretty full, MacLachlan reveals that he too is an alien, here to bring his 'man' in.

Had 'The Hidden' been the gigantic commercial hit it deserved to be, the scene where It emerges from its host would now be as squeamishly renowned as the chestburster in Alien. As a victim opens his mouth, spidery legs suddenly grip his face from inside, and a horrible, quivering, Freudian nightmare drags itself from inside. It's a truly disgusting, unrepeatable scene which stays with the viewer for a long, long time: if 'Alien' presents a nightmare parody of birth, then this is a kebab's awful revenge after a rough Saturday night.

Wisely, it doesn't happen onscreen again, and we are left with the knowledge that later hosts will have that forced into them. The thing is far smaller than ordinary aliens, and given that it looks like one of those magnified pictures of carpet fleas with the addition of some
50s radiation, the film-makers are demanding us to make quite a conceptual leap to see this thing as intelligent (even if, in the final analysis, it's a yob).

Just for once, the villain doesn't intend to invade, it has no grand designs or devilish schemes: he's just a punk out for a laugh. Clearly absorbing some of the fantasies of the dull white men he inhabits, the hidden beastie wants a wild weekend of booze, fast cars, strippers, violent crime and loud music. With a lightning pace, some astonishing stunts, and more acid humour than a dozen other movies, 'The Hidden' is an insane black comedy, with the desert dry Nouri increasingly unable to deal with his psycho quarry or his earnest alien partner (having paid the same part here, in 'Blue Velvet' and in 'Twin Peaks', MacLachlan's promising career imploded).

Only running out of steam close to the end, but with a fascinatingly ambiguous climax that just might see the good alien possessing Nouri's dead body to take care of his wife and kid, it's short, sharp and utterly plausible. How Sholder failed to become a major action director after this is anybody's guess, and needless to say the DTV sequel is a pointless rehash that offers nothing but a dull night in.

Summary: