The Hidden

Directed by: Jack Scholder

Starring: Kyle Maclachlan, Michael Nouri

Synopsis: Why has a middle aged salary man suddenly taken to violent armed robbery, developed a taste for fast cars (particularly Ferraris) and loud rock music? And what is a baby-faced FBI agent’s interest in the case and what is he not telling?

These are the questions facing cop Tom Beck, played by Michael Nouri as he pursues Jack DeVries, once mild-mannered bank manager, now crazed bank robber and murderer. Once De-Vries is in “custody” (read: life support), another mild-mannered citizen continues the crime spree in DeVries’ place!

Review: This movie came out during the lull between controversies regarding violent movies. We had already endured the debacle of the “Video Nasty”, a collection of movies which were banned for their content or in some cases purely because of their lurid name and or video cover artwork. In the early 90’s we went through a similar situation as Quentin Tarantino found out to his dismay. Reservoir Dogs enjoyed not one, but two successful cinema releases, because it had been refused a certificate on video. Even those Teenage Mutant Turtles were no longer “Ninja”, but “Heroes”, and any scenes of either throwing stars or nunchuks were mercilessly cut. Violent movies have long been held as an easy scapegoat by the right-wing tabloids, and any violent tragedy was a good excuse to bring out the same old comments. We were no longer allowed to enjoy violent spectacle.

Here then, is a movie which begins with so much, gleeful violence that you half expect to see a bodycount tally in the corner of the screen. The villain is completely amoral and egocentric. If he wants something (car, ghetto blaster) he takes it, with force. It was such a breath of fresh air!

The movie opens with CCTV footage inside a bank. In walks a man in a trenchoat, who pulls out a shotgun and starts blasting away before robbing the place. As he walks out, he stops and looks directly into the CCTV camera, smiles, and blasts it to pieces.

Meet Jack DeVries – two weeks ago a mild mannered bank manager, now LA’s Most Wanted. And he’s about to meet his match in Detective Tom Beck, who with an army of cops blast his car into oblivion.

At the hospital, Tom’s feeling grimly happy about the fact that DeVries is unlikely to pull through, as his partner informs the shocked surgeon of the litany of crimes he’d committed. However, things are not quite as they seem, for Devries is host to an alien criminal. Now DeVries’ body has had it, it’s time to find a new body to inhabit and have some fun in...

As this yucky transfer takes place, Tom is being introduced to a new pain in the neck, FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher (Kyle Maclachlan), who is searching for DeVries. On learning he’s in hospital, he races there, only to find him dead, while another patient in the same room has checked out. Now Lloyd needs Beck’s help in tracking down this new guy.

What follows is a smart, exciting thriller. We follow both the alien’s adventures and the cop’s investigation. Beck becomes more and more agitated with Lloyd because he knows that he’s not telling him the whole truth. Lloyd displays some strange behaviour – not knowing how to take either asprin or alka selza, for example.

All the actors who play the Alien are excellent (Babylon 5 fans will no doubt spot Claudia Christian in an early role here). The alien displays certain idiosyncrasies, no matter which body it’s in. For example, it always likes to stare into its own eyes, through a mirror...one of the best scenes of the movie has the alien inside a little dog (!), and we watch as it stares at itself in the mirror while standing on the back of a chair – its reminiscent of the alien husky roaming the research base in John Carpenter’s The Thing.

The alien’s penchant for Ferraris leads to one of the funniest scenes in the movie, when he barges into a Ferrari showroom. We find the salesman and a customer snorting lines of coke out of the trunk of a model Ferrari!

Director Jack Scholder made one or two other movies of note – Renegades followed a couple of years later, starring Kieffer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Philips, and By Dawn’s Early Light, a thriller dealing with a series of events leading up to World War III. But it is The Hidden that movie fans will thank him for the most.

Fans of Tarantino and Robert Rodrigues might want to look out for "Machete" himself, Danny Trejo in a very early, blink-and-you'll-miss-him scene towards the end of the movie! 8 Out of 10 (Review by MikeOutWest)