Aliens are dicks.
It’s true. I mean they’re either mischievous arseholes or
super malevolent pricks and what’s worse is: they don’t give a shit. Who’s
gonna foot that bill when an alien spills paint on your car or destroys half
your capital city with a condensed-blue death ray? Them?? Haha what ye gonna do
tough guy? Email them a fucking invoice??? HAHA WHATEVER.
But, right, what if, the aliens brought down a weird
interplanetary war that you weren’t even aware of and played it out HERE. On
the streets. And all you had was a non-believing cop and an FBI agent to suss
it out. Sounds like a tiny underperforming franchise called MEN IN BLACK,
right? Wrong. These, my friends, are the proto-MIB films, The Hidden and The
Hidden 2. Enjoy.
THE HIDDEN (1987)/
Jack Sholder/ New Line Cinema
Directed by Jack Sholder, The Hidden by all intent and
purposes should be schlock-fest 9000, which it kind of is, but there’s ~craft~
to it. There’s a slickness and thrust to the directing that makes this film way
more fun and cool than you’d think. Car Chases are break neck,
fluorescent-light-on-bonnet, reflections in a night puddle, tyre screeching
round corner blazes. The editing in gun fights and removal of frames, addition
of shadows give everything such a fucking I
m p a c t that you don’t even realise you’re sitting there first pumping
through the whole thing.
The main alien in this is cool for the brief time we get to
see it (as it is “hidden” in humans. No even an alien could enjoy that) as a
gooey, insectoid little parasite, threatening 80s consumerism by reflecting its
own mantra back on it. Want want want. Kill kill kill. Hey, this aliens
stealing that fucking RADIO I was going to buy. HE’S THREATENING MY CAPITALISM.
The aliens consumption even reaching the heady heights of taking a woman as a
host and killing a guy during sex. It wants it all. Hedonism from the planet Pluto.
The effects are great too, gnarly and goopy and full frontal agony as the
transferral from host to host, revealing the parasite. Exposing it as weak
outside the body, indestructible inside.
A pre-Twin Peaks Kyle McLachlan is here as an FBI agent and
I couldn’t help but sit and daydream about how this could be Dale Coopers
origin story. Retiring from chasing soul-jumping, body-expiring aliens for the
rural mountain small-town chintzy banalities of murder and drama. He’s seen too
much, now he wants too less. McLachlan and rusty cop Michael Nouri’s chemistry
is pretty cool and they get a lot of fun lines in like when McLachlan’s
character Lloyd tells Nouri’s character Tom about the possibility of aliens:
“I can read minds.”
“oh yeah what am I
thinking?”
“youre thinking im
full of shit”
“impressive”
“not really, youre
easy to read.”
It’s just a heap of fucking fun. Plus if you needed extra
selling, it shares almost the exact same soundtrack as TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
2. Just to give you a wee hint of the music’s tone here. The film knows it’s a
party film. Things explode, people die, chases are given, there’s ocean blue
skies, 80s downtown LA, crash zooms and most importantly, that beautiful New
Line Cinema sheen to it. Ye cannot beat it with a stick.
I had a big part about the ending too which, isn’t super
spectacular, but does have a nice twist and a understated, meaningful final
frame that I went “YESSSS” to, but I won’t spoil it. It’s a shame that barely
anyone speaks about/has seen this because it’s so great. I was lucky enough to
see it on 35mm at Edinburgh All Night Horror in a packed screen and it played
like fucking gangbusters. Watch The Hidden. You’ll fucking love it.
The Hidden II
(1993)/ Seth Pinsker/ New Line Cinema
Imagine pressing your lips to the lips of a loved one. Both
your mouths open. Then what you do is, you inhale quickly but safely, giving
the other person an exhilarating rush of breathlessness and you both laugh.
Right, imagine doing that but you suck out too much air and your partner goes
flat like a lilo. You’ve sucked them empty and they’re just a pepperami wrapper
drifting down a gutter in the rain. That’s The Hidden 2.
Right, 90’s direct-to-videos are a shitemare of bad
shooting, lazy concepts and actors that look like they’ve walked into the wrong
shop. The Hidden 2 has all of this and a weeee bit more but there’s some stuff
to enjoy. Like the effects are so cool and weird. We see much more of the
parasites from the first film and they’re like these greasy, piccalilli
coloured pakora alien wee dudes that look so ugly and gross you feel bad for
the actors when they end up on their face and in their mouths. There’s also an
incredibly violent body explosion at the end too that still looks SO great. There’s……um……also
an ……..industrial warehouse dance sex party? That was cool. It kind of reminded
me of the warehouse club from Hellraiser 3, except this time there’s no pinhead
trapped in a statue, but rather wee pakora aliens trying to invade the one
thing you hold sacred: Your body. If your body is a temple then these parasites
are Lara fucking croft.
The film starts with a fake on-screen IBM transmission of
backstory and facts and stats that remind me a bit of the transmissions from
the start of alien3 and its fairly neat, but then it shows like 15 minutes of
solid footage from the previous film, just to establish one minute of the new
one. It’s just such a weird choice?
Apart from that, the film is so flat and dull and unlovingly
made that it made me love it in a weird way. There’s a shoehorned love story
between the female human lead and the male alien lead and it made me kind of
freak. I should explain here that she’s the daughter of the cop Tom from the
first Hidden. So she KNOWS full well that aliens are a nightmare in general, so
banging them would be like your own mini-rubix cube of hang-ups. But oh well. There’s
also some story about how the alien pods are looking for hosts to take over the
world? It’s a fucking mess but I liked it in its own goofy, paceless, aimless
way.
Here they are: coupla interplanetary dirties
Oh but, there’s an absolute banging techno track on here.
Not even kidding as soon as I heard it I sat up from posting online about
fucking an alien and went “OH SHIT”. Here it’s here.
So aye, the Hidden 2. Like racing a Lamborghini in a bin bag
full of skateboard wheels, it’ll never ever beat The Hidden but at least it
exists for no reason.
-Findlay
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