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.