Three years before his pop culture breakthrough role in Twin Peaks, Kyle MacLachlan got his first practice at playing a weirdo FBI agent in the sci-fi thriller The Hidden. While the film wasn’t much of a box office smash at the time, it went on to become a cult item, especially among fans of the actor and his later, more famous work.
MacLachlan wasn’t exactly a complete unknown in 1987. He’d starred in the infamous box office disaster Dune in 1984 and then in the controversial psycho-sexual drama Blue Velvet two years later, both for director David Lynch (with whom he’d of course reunite for Twin Peaks). However, The Hidden was his first feature starring role away from Lynch, and his first to receive any sort of mainstream acceptance, even if modest. Made no mistake, the picture is a pretty straightforward and formulaic mid-1980s B-movie, but it holds up surprisingly well and still has a lot of entertainment value today.
| Title: | The Hidden |
| Year of Release: | 1987 |
| Director: | Jack Sholder |
| Watched On: | Blu-ray |
| Also Available On: | Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
In addition to MacLachlan, observant Twin Peaks fans will recognize a couple other future cast members from that series in The Hidden. Chris Mulkey (later the abusive Hank Jennings in Peaks) appears right away as a bank robber, while Jack McGee, a character actor who’d made a career often playing bartenders, fills that role in both projects as well.
The film opens with a bank heist and a pretty exciting car chase for a production of this budget. The culprit (Mulkey) dresses like a respectable businessman but has no regard for human life, or even his own safety, as he brazenly guns down security guards at the bank and plows through innocent pedestrians in his stolen Ferrari, until his getaway is finally brought to an end with a police barricade and a hail of bullets. Overworked L.A.P.D. detective Tom Beck (Michael Nouri) thinks the case is closed when the perpetrator dies in a hospital afterward, until FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher (MacLachlan) shows up at his desk and insists otherwise. This brazen sociopath, who’d been a model citizen with hardly so much as a traffic ticket on his record up until a few days earlier, has a partner following the same pattern that behaves exactly like him and – how weird is this? – just happens to have been in the next hospital bed over, awaiting a triple bypass surgery before standing up and walking away.
The Hidden quickly settles into a familiar buddy-cop formula when Beck is assigned (grudgingly) to assist Gallagher in hunting the new killer, and the one after that, and the one after that, as random people seemingly turn evil out of the blue, one following the next in series after the last one dies. The only connection any of them appear to have is physical proximity, and they all share the same obsession with loud rock music and fast sports cars. Much to Beck’s frustration, Gallagher clearly knows more than he’s willing to divulge at first, and he has some rather peculiar behavioral affectations of his own, almost as if he doesn’t understand basic things about the world that any normal person would surely know.
It’s hardly a spoiler to reveal that the real villain is an alien parasite that can take over human bodies, and jumps to a new host each time the last one wears out or is killed. Back in the day, the VHS packaging gave that much away right in its plot summary on the rear cover. (So do the DVD and Blu-ray.) Having figured that out, it shouldn’t be too difficult to put together the FBI agent’s backstory either. The Hidden doesn’t really have plot twists, so much as story beats you can see coming from a galaxy away.
Somehow, that hardly matters. Nor does the unanswered question of why an alien who simply takes anything he wants would need to rob a bank in the first place. (It’s not like he uses money to pay for anything.) Some of the visual effects also look pretty hokey, but issues like those are forgivable. The character interplay between MacLachlan and Nouri is entertaining, and future Babylon 5 star Claudia Christian has a very fun turn as one of the parasite’s later victims.
The Hidden is an unpretentious and efficient little thriller that delivers exactly what it promises: decent action and suspense on a modest budget, without turning too egregiously dumb. In the days when video stores still dominated the home video landscape, those qualities made it perfect rental fodder. A few decades down the road, the movie remains fondly remembered. It pairs well with Invasion of the Body Snatchers (any version) or They Live.
The Blu-ray
The Warner Archive Collection released The Hidden on Blu-ray in 2017. Unfortunately, the disc is sourced from an older video master, likely created for the New Line Home Video DVD edition in 2000. The full-screen 16:9 image (slightly opened up from the theatrical 1.85:1) is rather dated in quality. Contrast and colors are flat, detail is mediocre, grain looks noisy, and some light edge enhancement is visible at times. The best I can say for it is that it looks adequate. The disc isn’t unwatchable, but I feel certain that a good remastering could do a lot for even a low-budget movie like this.
The soundtrack is offered in a choice of either a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 remix or the original theatrical mono (DTS-HD MA 2.0). Of late, I’ve often favored original soundtracks over gimmicky multi-channel remixes. In this case, I’m not so sure. The Hidden was a low-budget production and never had a particularly elaborate or powerful sound mix. The mono track is acceptable overall, but has little dynamic range. That’s problematic during the action scenes. Gunshots and explosions are weak, sometimes distractingly so. It sounds like a made-for-video movie from the era.
The 5.1 remix isn’t tremendously better. In fact, at times it’s decidedly worse and makes some of those gunshots sound weirdly hollow. However, the 5.1 track gooses the bass a little, which benefits the hard rock music the villain plays everywhere he goes. Directional steering of sounds also makes the car chase that opens the picture a lot more fun. Neither track sounds great. Each has its plusses and minuses. The best I can advise is to pick whichever format you think you’re inclined to enjoy more based on your usual preferences.
Bonus features are all carried over from DVD. The small selection of items includes an audio commentary by director Jack Sholder and fellow filmmaker Tim Hunter (River’s Edge), a featurette about the special effects, and a trailer.
Related
- Kyle MacLachlan
- Thematically-Similar Alien Movies
The Video File Blog 