Rating summary
Movie | | 4.0 |
Video | | 4.5 |
Audio | | 4.0 |
Extras | | 2.5 |
Overall | | 4.0 |
The Hidden Blu-ray Movie Review
Body Snatcher
Reviewed by Michael Reuben October 10, 2017
I first saw The Hidden on cable TV in the late Eighties, and I watched it at least half a dozen
times thereafter, each time asking myself, "Why isn't this film better known?" Apparently I
wasn't alone, because the film's success on cable and home video far exceeded its modest
performance in theaters. An inventive offering from New Line Cinema, The Hidden was a
product of an era when the studio known as "The House That Freddy Built" was still an
independent company specializing in modestly budgeted genre fare. New Line was responsible
for its share of forgettable junk, but The Hidden is one of its bona fide classics. For the film's
thirtieth anniversary, the Warner Archive Collection has brought it to Blu-ray in a first-rate
presentation that wisely doesn't try to overcome The Hidden's low-budget origins but shows
them to best advantage.
Los Angeles is plagued by a mystifying wave of brazen crimes committed by previously ordinary
citizens with no criminal record and no apparent fear of the authorities. The first offender is a
respectable businessman, Jack DeVries (Chris Mulkey), who guns down the security guards in a
bank after he robs it, then pauses to grin directly into the security camera before fleeing. After
leading the LAPD on a car chase that leaves a trail of death and destruction behind him, DeVries
goes down in a hail of bullets and gasoline fire. But he doesn't die—not yet.
DeVries is only the first in a series of increasingly unlikely spree killers. As Detective Tom Beck
(Michael Nouri,
Flashdance) tries to make sense
of the mounting carnage, he's confronted with
another conundrum in the person of FBI Special Agent Lloyd Gallagher (Kyle MacLachlan,
Twin
Peaks). Gallagher appears in Beck's station claiming to be on the trail of DeVries, but every time
another mad criminal springs up, Gallagher claims to be chasing that one too. Beck has no choice
but to follow Gallagher's lead, after he's assigned to him as a partner. Beck's usual partner, Cliff
Willis (Ed O'Ross), has been reassigned to the security detail of a visiting presidential hopeful,
Senator Holt (John McCann), whose impending arrival has Beck's superiors scrambling to
ensure adequate security. (The prominent placement of actor Ed O'Ross in
The Hidden's one-sheet suggests a much larger role in the
film than he actually has.)
It's no spoiler to reveal that the real perpetrator of all the violence is an interstellar fugitive with
the ability to enter and control a human body, discarding each one after it's too damaged to
remain viable. The entity is never named in
The Hidden, and its origins remain unspecified. (At
one point, Gallagher simply points upward, in a jokey reference to a famous scene in
Close
Encounters of the Third Kind.) We see the creature's true form only a few times, and it's a
wormy monstrosity with a gooey texture and spidery tentacles that suggest some of the gruesome
manifestations in John Carpenter's
The Thing. More
mysterious is how Gallagher seems to know
so much about the alien, but signs quickly accumulate that he, too, is not of this world.
The Hidden's script was written by Jim Kouf (under the pen name "Bob Hunt"), who
demonstrated his facility with buddy cop cliches in
Stakeout and
Rush Hour, but here he deftly
blends them with sci-fi tropes, primarily from
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, along with gory
supernatural elements from films like the
Evil
Dead series. Director Jack Sholder
(A Nightmare
on Elm Street 2) made some additions to the script, but his chief contribution to
The Hidden is a
briskly efficient pace that makes it feel more like an action movie than a tale of alien invasion.
Bullets fly, cars carom off each other on city streets, bodies plunge from high places and the
effects crew gets to create even more explosions than creature effects. Sholder stages a police
station battle reminiscent of the unrelenting attack in
The Terminator, another film with a
remorseless alien foe for whom human law enforcement was just an inconvenience to be shoved
aside. By the time the invader is defeated, it has tallied a formidable body count.
The Hidden wouldn't work nearly as well without its two impressive leads. Nouri was reportedly
a nightmare to work with—Sholder doesn't hesitate to dish in his commentary—but his bad
temper gives Det. Beck an edgy intensity that emphasizes the frightful strangeness of what's
happening around him. MacLachlan, who was just coming off his first two projects with David
Lynch (
Dune and
Blue Velvet), artfully underplays, letting Gallagher's unfamiliarity with routine
human behavior emerge gradually. In the classic "take your new partner home to dinner" scene
that is a buddy cop staple, Gallagher's swift inebriation from a single beer and his bewilderment
when Beck hands him an Alka Seltzer are subtle comic grace notes. The sequence briefly
lightens the mood, but Sholder and Kouf are just setting us up for the mayhem that leads to the
film's dark conclusion (though, depending on one's point of view, there's a silver lining—or,
more accurately, a golden one).
The Hidden Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality
The Hidden was shot by a New Line low-budget veteran, Jacques Haitkin, with whom director
Jack Sholder had worked on A Nightmare on
Elm Street 2. (He also shot the original Nightmare for Wes Craven.) For this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray from the Warner Archive Collection, an
interpositive was scanned at 2K by Warner's Motion Picturing Imaging facility. MPI's color
correction was guided by reference to an original answer print on low-fade stock, followed by
WAC's customary cleanup to remove dirt, scratches and print damage. The resulting image
won't be anyone's idea of gorgeous cinema, but it's faithful to the film's gritty aesthetic. As
Sholder describes in his commentary, he and his team attempted to minimize the color blue, and
while the resulting greenish tinge isn't pushed as far as in The Matrix,
there's a sallow cast to many of the scenes, and flesh tones are often unnatural, especially in dim light. Still, the brighter
color values in contrasting venues (e.g., a garish strip club and Beck's cheerful home) confirm
that the relatively desaturated passages represent a deliberate choice by Sholder and his DP.
Given the film's low-budget origins, MPI has extracted an impressively sharp and detailed image
that grounds the story's fantastical elements in a credible everyday world. Nighttime blacks are
deep and solid, and the image is free of artifacts, noise or untoward digital manipulations. WAC
has mastered The Hidden at its usual average high bitrate, here 34.86 Mbps.
The Hidden Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality
The Hidden was released to theaters in mono, which WAC has included as an option, encoded in
lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. The disc's default track is the 5.1 remix that New Line created for the
2000 DVD, also encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA. The remix is conservative, with a front-oriented focus, but the fidelity is surprisingly good and the
dynamic range is sufficient to lend
impact and authority to the film's pyrotechnics. The dialogue is clear and well-prioritized, and
the electronic score by Michael Convertino (The Santa
Clause) lend an appropriately fantastical
atmosphere to the proceedings.
The Hidden Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras
The extras have been ported over from New Line's 2000 DVD. The trailer has been remastered
in 1080p.
- Commentary with Director Jack Sholder and Tim Hunter: Hunter is the director of
River's Edge, among others, but his comments are
minimal until the end, when he and
Sholder discuss the film's larger themes. The bulk of the commentary belongs to Sholder,
who provides a wealth of practical detail about the production, including script revisions
and plot ideas that were considered and abandoned.
- Special Effects Production Footage Narrated by Jack Sholder (480i; 1.33:1; 7:32):
Sholder's narration describes how the creature's appearance evolved in consultation with
effects creator Kevin Yagher. Tim Hunter also speaks, which suggests that these
comments were initially recorded as part of the commentary. The compilation includes
black-and-white test footage (described by Sholder in the main commentary) where the
creature's final appearance was staged differently. The concept was rejected, and Sholder
explains why.
- Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 2:20). "Something strange is happening . . . to some
ordinary people."
The Hidden Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation
If someone were to remake The Hidden today, they'd have all the tools of digital filmmaking at
their disposal, and they'd no doubt succumb to the temptation to show more of the alien creature
and linger over its ickiness. The limitations within which Sholder had to work, both technical and
budgetary, forced him to rely on performance and simple physical effects, and the film is all the
better for it. WAC has given it the best treatment it's ever had on home video, and their Blu-ray
presentation is highly recommended.