And so we come to The Hidden which is that rarest of all things: a movie able to rise above its stupid premise and become something great. And it really is a stupid premise, one that is embarrassingly juvenile. Oh, but the resulting movie rocks so hard in places that you'll wonder why you never heard much about it.
The premise is actually, pretty simple. Two slimy alien creatures have come to Earth. One is an alien master criminal, the other is the alien equivalent of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. But rather than simply disguise themselves as humans or lurk menacingly in shadows, these aliens are capable of crawling inside people and animals and taking them over (See? Stupid!). Once inside, the aliens can not only control all of the actions of their host, they make the host incredibly resilient and difficult to kill (See? Even more stupid!). And so it goes, with the naughty alien going on crime sprees that end when the selected body is finally pulped, whereupon it crawls out and grabs another body, much to the consternation of the law-enforcing alien.
The whole thing is tied together with the good alien essentially taking over the body of a dead FBI agent who is "assigned" to the case of hunting down the bad guy. The police in the area, unaware of the alien parasites, are baffled by the surprise crime sprees of people who, just days before, were completely happy, law-abiding citizens. The creepy FBI agent (played by a very spooky-eyed Kyle MacLachlan) always seems to be one jump ahead of the police, and his extremely bizarre behavior makes his new cop partner (played by B-movie standby Michael Nouri, best known for playing Ben Hurley in Flashdance) increasingly suspicious.
Okay, like I said, this is a really dumb premise for a movie (particularly when you discover that the bad alien is a huge slimy insect-like thing and the good alien is apparently made up of shimmery golden light). But they pull it off with some of the most enjoyable scenes in B-grade science fiction movies of the last 30 years.
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