(1987) ***A homicidal alien parasite is on the loose. It possesses each body until it can no longer sustain life then jumps to the next one. This makes it nearly impossible to track as the police are chasing individuals instead of one alien being in disguise. FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher(Kyle MacLachlan) arrives and seems to know what is going on but refuses to disclose his information to the local police. He and police Sgt. Tom Beck(Michael Nouri) team up to stop the killing spree. Lloyd explains that the criminal they are chasing killed his family. Tom is leery of Lloyd since each time they catch up to a perpetrator their dead and the pursuit changes to different person. Tiring of Lloyd's vagueness, Tom has him arrested. Soon after all hell breaks loose and Tom looks to Lloyd for answers. What he learns is more outrageous then he could ever have imagined.
After seeing the sub standard Afterdark Horrorfest film Hidden, I was reminded of this film I had seen back in the '80's. Although The Hidden is dated in many ways it still retains it's edge. The creature resembles a giant slug with spider leg tentacles. The violence is abundant and the pace is fast and furious. The frustration conveyed by both the police sgt. and the FBI agent causes added tension to the already tense situation. While not a particularly scary film, The Hidden has a solid story and plenty of excitement to keep your interest. Viewing this again after more than 20 years I can honestly say I wasn't disappointed, that alone is pretty impressive.
11 comments:
Ha! I love this movie. I think it rests largely on the strength of that first scene when the slug switches bodies. Some good practical effects that really sell the idea, and thereafter they don't need much.
It also rests on Claudia Christian's fine ass. I watched The Hidden once years before Babylon 5 started, and when I watched it again I couldn't believe it was her.
I'm glad you watched this because of the scene in which the guy is "fucked to death," which makes absolutely no sense. I've got another movie to review that features a similar concept, which added to the victim in your Coffin Joe flick makes 3 deaths by pleasure.
If you tie in the life draining bj's from Whirly's female vampire we might have a record number of deaths by pleasure.
This is one of my movie poster flicks that I meant to watch last year (i.e. movies I never saw but I remember the poster). I'll definitely check this out next year. Nice summary!
Death by pleasure? Perhaps you guys have discovered another sub-genre of horror, a sub-sub-genre.
Oh totally! As you may remember, movie death subsets are a favorite of mine. I'm bummed because in a recent 'thon I saw two different movies in which a topless women is impaled on a pair of antlers on the wall. One was the Lost Boys sequel, but I forget the other one (which is why I'm bummed).
Anyone?
I still don't think I've topped the death score of '04, when I saw four people get snagged by bearclaw traps, and two people killed by being stabbed by a statue of a unicorn head. Two different movies!
I believe that was Silent Night, Deadly Night Octo.
I really like this movie, but I wonder how much of my enjoyment was dependent on being so thoroughly in the dark about what the hell was going on.
Larry Niven wrote a story called "Death by Ecstasy." It was very good. A neo-noir sci-fi/detective story in the Blade Runner mode (he did a series of those).
Correct, Cat! The other unicorn head death was in The Abominable Dr. Phibes.
But what I'm really trying to remember is that other topless-chick-impaled-on-antlers flick. I can't even recall if she was a vampire at the time or not.
So what was the scoop with the Niven story, Jordan? Lots of pleasure death?
I guess the mother load of death by pleasure would be "Teeth". Would the penis removals in "I Spit on Your Grave" & "LHOTL" count?
The Niven story is (as I said) part of a larger structure of sci-fi future history (the "Known Space" continuity) in which there are electric current addicts, presented as the "ultimate" drug addicts. You go get an operation and they put a small Matrix-style device in the back of your head. That's the only expenditure for the addict.
Henceforth you've got a tiny socket in the back of your skull, hidden by your hair. When you plug a "droud" (slang for the device) into the back of your head, with the cord trailing to an AC adapter plugged into a wall socket, you get a regulated current straight to the pleasure center of your brain. Drouds have timer circuits because otherwise you'd never turn them off. Anyway in this story "the mob" kills this one guy by shortening the electrical cable on his droud and removing the timing circuit so that he sits in his easy chair "under the wire" for about three days and the cops find him dead of dehydration/starvation. The kitchen was right there, but he couldn't get to it without turning off the droud. (Did I mention that the victim was an old friend of the detective/protagonist?) Nasty stuff. The corpse looks like a skull and cleaning robots have removed all the fingerprints/evidence. Nasty. "Death by Ecstasy."
That book sounds incredible Jordan.
It's just a short story, but it's part of a much larger "future history" project that Niven began in about 1965 and basically ended with "Ringworld," his 1970 Hugo- and Nebula-winning classic.
Niven returned to the "Known Space" continuity ten years later for a Ringworld sequel called "The Ringworld Engineers," and then called it quits, moving onto other stuff (although he's recently gotten back into the Known Space stuff, with dubious results. Like many a sci-fi giant, he's suddenly become very, very bad.)
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