I’m back to the 80’s horror now and with body snatching space slug film “The Hidden” from 1987. Staring Kyle MacLachlan looking pretty much exactly as he did in Twin Peaks a few years later and acting a bit like he did in the series relaunch more recently. He plays FBI Agent “Lloyd Gallagher” who teams up with cop “Tom Beck”, played by Michael Nouri. The film is also the feature debut of Claudia Christian (Ivanova from Babylon 5). The film is directed by Jack Shoulder (Alone in the Dark, Nightmare on Elm Street 2) and written by Jim Kouf (Stakeout, National Treasure, Rush Hour).
October Review Challenge – Day 18
The film kicks off right away with a violent bank robbery and a car chase, with the robber having a whale of a time blasting out rock music while driving recklessly to evade the cops. Eventually he gets gunned down, but is taken to hospital and put in intensive care. At this point FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher turns up at police headquarters looking for the same suspect. However on discovering the suspect dead at the hospital his hunt turns to another patient that had contact with him. Both suspects are unusual because they showed no sign of criminal activity or malicious acts in the past and just seem to have flipped and gone on a rampage. Both sharing a love for sports cars and rock music.
Of course since this is a science fiction horror there is more to it and as I opened up by calling it a “Body snatching space slug film” you can probably guess where this is going. The real antagonist is said space slug and it transfers itself between victims and then uses them to go on it’s sociopathic crime sprees. After wearing out the bodies of the first two it takes control of a stripper, Brenda (Christian) leading to a tense chase with Gallagher and Beck. Gallagher though has a secret of his own and a personal vendetta with the alien. Things become more difficult for our heroes as their target starts to get more ambitious with it’s choice of bodies, leading to a dramatic final showdown.
A Source of Inspiration?
This is an interesting film and a pretty original take on the body snatcher idea. It reminds me a lot of the film “Fallen” (1998) with Denzel Washington, and I can’t help but wonder if they took some influence from The Hidden when writing that. Fallen is the better film, at least as a horror and did a lot more with the idea, but that’s not to say The Hidden is bad. The movie is pretty light in the horror and science fiction aspects and is really an action movie with a horror/sci-fi premise and in that regard it is pretty satisfying. There are a lot of shoot outs and the body thief can take a lot of punishment before at has to flee a body making it a little bit like a Terminator film.
Kyle MacLachlan playing a weird FBI agent before he starred in Twin Peaks is interesting too. There is almost no way this film didn’t play into his casting and long before his “Dougie Jones” days (In the recent Twin Peaks continuation) he showed his talent for playing “not quite there” characters. Thes rest of the cast do an adequate job and I always enjoy seeing Claudia Christian (As well as playing a fan favourite on Babylon 5, she just seems like a cool person. One of the few celebrities I never regretted following on social media).
Assessment
The action scenes are pretty solid and the plot pushes along at a good pace so you are never bored watching. The plot tries to keep itself simple and a lot of that requires suspension of disbelief and not thinking too hard about what the reaction from most people would be to these events (Like when people they’ve known for years suddenly turn into unstoppable killing machines and go on murder sprees for no apparent reason). There are definitely some holes there, but the fast pace stops you dwelling too long on them.
Overall this is a pretty good movie, but it trades exploration of the premise for quick action and by the standard of 80’s action movies it is not especially notable. As a body thief horror though it comes up very short against the similar Fallen (or the first two Body Snatchers films), so it isn’t in the upper reaches of good, but it is well worth checking out some time. This is a strong 6/10.
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