11/6/2023 0 Comments Hidden in plain sight movie![]() Claudia Christian gets the most arresting version of the character, done up as she is in a stripper outfit with thigh high red boots and a dress that goes all the way down in the back, but the little smile Chris Mulkey gives from behind the wheel during the opening chase is equally disarming. All of them have collaborated such that they are all recognizably the same character, whether they're played by Claudia Christian or Ed O'Ross. One of those details is the congruence of the performances by the actors playing the alien criminal. It doesn't take its foot off the gas, per se, so much as it adds embellishing details along the way. And yet, its execution of its narrative is just a half step out of phase with what we might expect from a film that's all narrative forward motion. It's an effective opening, one that grabs the audience by the adrenals while getting them to ask questions about what they are watching. You don't get actual characters until the film has been playing for a while. It starts with a bank robbery and a high-speed chase that ends in a hail of gunfire. The Hidden doesn't screw around with exposition. The alien has it in his head to possess the body of a politician running for the Senate, and our heroes must race to stop him. stealing Ferraris, killing bystanders, and listening to loud music, switching bodies as needed from a mild mannered stock broker to a cardiac patient to a stripper to Beck's usual partner. Meanwhile, their quarry rampages across L.A. Gallagher himself seems to be the host to such a creature as well. Gallagher has good reason for his reticence: the criminal he's tracking is an alien slug who takes possession of human hosts and assumes command of their bodies. Nouri's Tom Beck is irritated at being kept in the dark. MacLachlan's character, FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher, knows more about the crimes than he tells his partner. The premise of The Hidden finds buddy cops Kyle MacLachlan and Michael Nouri chasing after a series of criminals who seem unconnected to each other in spite of the similarity of their crimes. It's a pretty good low-budget genre picture with enough quirks to make it stand out from films of similar provenance. None of which really has anything to do with The Hidden beyond the suggestion that it is an artifact of a bygone era, but it's one that's worth your attention for all that. There are so many more shows competing for eyes these days that a movie has to be something really special to survive the winnowing process. I suppose this is still possible, but it's much more difficult in the present movie economy. Good movies-and The Hidden is a pretty good movie-could have a long commercial life even if no one saw them at the multiplex. This was back when movies still had some kind of commercial half-life after opening weekend. A marginal hit in theaters, it found its audience in mom and pop video stores across the country. The Hidden (1987, directed by Jack Sholder) is one of those films from the 1980s that took full advantage of the video revolution.
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