Off Script: The Hidden

Film: The Hidden
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

There’s no good reason why The Hidden should work as a film or even as a story. This is the kind of movie that requires its audience to have a massive willing suspension of disbelief for any of it to work. It’s also a film that has a cast made up almost entirely of “that-guys”; watching it is like seeing every character actor from the 1970s and 1980s in one place. There are some definite horror elements here even though this is primarily a science fiction film. It’s also a spin on the buddy cop formula and the idea of an odd couple in terms of our two main characters. There’s a lot at play here, some of which seems to have been picked up by the high budget and much higher grossing Alien Nation of the following year.

The eventual buy-in is that you have to accept that there are alien creatures who have shown up on Earth and can invade the body of people and animals and take them over. We don’t know this right away, although we learn pretty quickly. What we also learn eventually is that one of these creatures is a nasty slug-like monster and that it’s a criminal that enjoys nothing more than slaughtering innocents, stealing fast cars, and causing as much mayhem as possible. The other is essentially a cop tracking down the bad alien. Got it? Good, because we’re going to go on quite the joyride in the 97 minutes The Hidden runs.

Off Script: Alone in the Dark (1982)

Film: Alone in the Dark (1982)
Format: Internet video on The Nook.

There’s a particular sick pleasure to a film like Alone in the Dark from 1982. This is a cheap horror film, the first film ever produced and distributed by New Line Cinema, so there aren’t a lot of surprises in terms of the subject matter here. The cast, though, is crazy for a cheap slasher film. It says something when Dwight Schultz whose greatest claim to acting fame comes from his roles as the crazy Murdoch on The A-Team plays the sanest one in the bunch. Donald Pleasence isn’t too difficult to cast in a film like this one—he had a track record, and seeing Jack Palance hamming it up as a psycho isn’t a stretch. But Martin Landau? If nothing else, I had to see this just for that.

Dan Potter (Dwight Schultz) shows up for his new job in a psychiatric hospital headed by Dr. Leo Bain (Donald Pleasence), who operates a very different sort of mental facility. Bain is of the belief that his patients should be given a great deal of autonomy and that they aren’t so much crazy as they are simply off on little mental vacations. He thinks this of all of his mental patients, including the dangerously, criminally insane men on the third floor. This group of four includes military veteran Frank Hawkes (Jack Palance), a dangerous paranoid who is convinced that Dan Potter got his position by killing the previous doctor; Byron Sutcliff (Martin Landau), a preacher with a penchant for burning churches with the congregation still inside; Ronald “Fatty” Elster (Erland van Lidth), a gigantic child molester; and Skaggs (Phillip Clark), known as “the Bleeder” because he gets nose bleeds when he attacks a victim.