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The Hidden (1987 film)

1987 film by Jack Sholder

The Hidden is a 1987 science fiction horror film about a mysterious FBI agent who recruits an LAPD detective to assist him in stemming a wave of ostensibly unrelated killings committed by hitherto law-abiding civilians, all of which turn out to be the handiwork of one extremely elusive extraterrestrial perpetrator/parasite.

Directed by Jack Sholder. Written by Jim Kouf (under the pseudonym Bob Hunt).
IT'S ONLY HUMAN ON THE OUTSIDEtaglines

Lt. John Masterson

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  • Look, Ed, Tom Beck is the best I've got. If I give him to you, I'll never get him back again. My department will then crumble, crime will run rampant, the city will fall into ruin, rampaging hordes will control the streets, and life as we know it will end.
  • [Holds a gun to Detective Beck's chest, revealing that this is merely Masterson's body, hosting the film's eponymous parasite.] I've already shot you once before. I can't tell you how much I'm waiting to do that to you again.

Dialogue

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Doctor: Detective Beck. No one deserves to die like that. I don't care what the man's done.
Cliff Willis: He killed twelve people, wounded twenty three more, stole six cars, most of them Ferraris. Robbed eight banks, six supermarkets, four jewelry stores and a candy shop. Six of the ones he killed he carved up with a butcher knife. Two of them were kids. He did all that in two weeks. If anyone deserves to go that way, it sure in the hell was him.
Tom Beck: Hey! Why would he come in here and kill a guy for a lousy hundred bucks and a radio?
Lloyd Gallagher: 'Cause he likes it. He sees something he wants, he steals it. If something gets in his way, he kills it. And right now, he's hiding out in your city.
Tom Beck: In the span of twelve hours, I've got five bodies—not counting Miller, who dies because he runs out of blood. A stripper screws some guy to death, steals his car and takes off. All of this in twelve hours. I wanna ask you: am I crazy, or does this seem just a little bit bizarre?
Lloyd Gallagher: Yeah, it's a little bizarre.
Tom Beck: I knew that. I just wanted to know if you knew that.
Tom Beck: You know what bothers me about these two guys DeVries and Miller?
Lloyd Gallagher: Neither has a criminal record. They both lead normal lives until a few days ago, and now they're killing people.
Tom Beck: Do you read minds or was that just a shot in the dark?
Lloyd Gallagher: No, I read minds.
Tom Beck: Oh yeah? What was I just thinking?
Lloyd Gallagher: That I'm full of shit.
Tom Beck: Impressive.
Lloyd Gallagher: Not really. Quite simple to read.
Tom Beck: She's bleeding to death, for Christ's sake! Why doesn't she go down?
Lloyd Gallagher: We've got to get to her before she dies.
Tom Beck: Why don't we wait until after she's dead?
Tom Beck: Oh boy. We're talking spacemen here?
Lloyd Gallagher: The way it works is... it finds a body, gets inside, uses it to move around, stays in that body until the body is so damaged it has to find another body. That's the only time I can kill it, when it's between bodies. I missed my chance when it came out of the stripper and found another body and changed before I got there.
Tom Beck: So now we don't know who the spaceman is.
Lloyd Gallagher: No, but I don't have to look for it anymore. It knows I'm here. It'll come after me. Beck, I need my weapon... that's the only thing that can kill it.
Tom Beck: So the spaceman is the one who killed your wife. The one that you've been tracking for the past...
Lloyd Gallagher: Nine years. Your time.
Tom Beck: Our time.
Lloyd Gallagher: I guess a career in the police didn't really prepare you for this, did it?
Tom Beck: Yes, it did. [Dissolve to Gallagher, back behind bars.] We'll try again later.
Lt. John Masterson: Alhague, how do you like being human?
Prisoner: [distant] Say, what?
[At this revelation, Tom Beck looks at Lloyd. Lloyd looks back]
Lloyd Gallagher: It's all right.
Lt. John Masterson: Better than being Altairian. Altairians are a filthy people. We could take over this place if we wanted. They have nothing here to stop us.
Lt. John Masterson: Alhague!
Lloyd Gallagher: Yes?
Lt. John Masterson: Before I kill you, I'm curious: how did you find me?
Lloyd Gallagher: You left an angry partner for dead on Altair.
Lt. John Masterson: A mistake.
Lloyd Gallagher: That's what it said.

About

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  • [I]t's every actress's worst nightmare to see her butt fifty feet tall in a movie theater. I decided that I needed to lose more weight for the role and visited a place called the Lindora Clinic where they put me on a 500-calorie-a-day diet and shot me full of a combination of vitamins and a substance that I would later discover to be pregnant-horse urine. My first day on set I was scheduled to perform the strip scene. The director, Jack Sholder, was not a happy man when he discovered that I'd duped him in regard to my physical attributes. Luckily, I'd already come clean to the wardrobe mistress, who'd set about designing a set of prosthetic breasts that I could wear under a cut-off T-shirt. It was a double win for me, because it meant that I also got to dodge the topless scene that Jack had planned on filming. [...] I attended the premiere of The Hidden and was pleased that my fake boobs looked convincing. Whether the horse piss worked I don't know, but when my butt had its premiere on the big screen, I breathed a sigh of relief; the nightmare had been averted—my alien-possessed ass looked pretty damn good.
  • There are a couple of aliens, and the bad one is particularly obstreperous. The creature is a parasite, and I don't mean that figuratively. (It looks like something you might find rooting around in the trash out behind a Lobster Shack.) To get around -- and it likes to get around -- it has to enter the body of a living being, and in this regard it's not too picky. It does have very selective tastes, however, and they run toward rock music, loud, and Ferraris, red if possible. (He's sort of a "Miami Vice" alien.)
  • The Hidden is a textbook example of how a B-movie can transcend its origins and budgetary constraints through craft, imagination, and all-around resourcefulness. Shifting genres almost as often as its villain changes bodies, it's at once an enormously effective thriller, a smart exercise in science fiction, an exciting action movie, and a kinetic dark comedy. [...] With the benefit of 13 years of hindsight, The Hidden's villainous extraterrestrial chameleon emerges as the ultimate '80s consumer run amok: a being of pure desire with a taste for the finer things (it makes a point of stealing only expensive sports cars), that lives for the moment and doesn't care about the consequences of its actions.

Taglines

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  • IT'S ONLY HUMAN ON THE OUTSIDE.

Cast

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