The Hidden (DVD)

In what could be a pedigree of his TWIN PEAKS role as FBI agent Dale Cooper, Kyle MacLachlan plays an otherworldly FBI agent in search of a psychotic killer on the loose in L.A. He teams up with local detective Michael Nouri after the killer has been cut down in a police shootout and tries to convince him that their problems are far from over. As we quickly discover, the real killer is an alien parasite that moves from body to body, rendering it nearly impossible to find. The good news is that almost immediately after infection the new host exhibits telltale behavior patterns, revealing the true nature of the alien hidden within it. The bad news is that these signs ...

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 ...

I first seen the hidden midway through the eighties when I was very young and hence did not understand the film one bit, since then I've been watching out for it to get another chance to view it and was pleased when my friend came back off holiday in America with the region one disk of it. Directed by Jack Shodder and made on a tiny budget, the hidden starts with a bang. As soon as the opening credits are gone we go straight into a scene with a man robbing a bank and in the process takes out a couple of guards with a sawn off shotgun, then looks up at the security camera, smiles and blows it up before running out to his black Ferrari and speeding off. Then, ...