Yuppie and the Alien (The Hidden, 1987)

I watched The Hidden on a portable DVD player in a particularly saturnine lounge in an isolated county hospital on the night before Halloween. By the time I had camped out in the lounge, it was already a little past 2 in the morning. I was at the hospital because one of our residents has a severe bronchial infection, and somebody had to spend the night with him. By 2 he had finally fallen asleep, so I left his bedside to go entertain myself until my relief arrived. Everything in the lounge down the hall from the kid's room was kind of yellow and pale orange and the total effect was sort of garish melancholia.

This was somehow the ideal set and setting in which to watch a movie about an alien species that takes possession of a number of Los Angelenos in the late 80s and makes them steal expensive cars (the alien is partial to Ferraris) and go on killing sprees. A young, young, very young Kyle MacLachlan stars as an alien policeman posing as an FBI agent who is tracking down the evil alien. Richard Brooks (Paul Robinette of Law&Order, the Ben Stone Era) also makes an appearance as a brash young cop already rocking the high fade that would later become Robinette's trademark. The soundtrack is chockful of late 80s IRS Records acts, including a Lords of the New Church song and a few Concrete Blonde tracks.*

The movie hits all its marks both as a movie about LA at the end of the Reagan years (car dealer snorting coke with a customer signing the papers to buy a Ferrari, record store clerk with a handgun in his cash register, and everyone from the cops to the store clerks with blow dried hair), and as a low budget horror thriller (cheesy but graphic special effects, gratuitous violence, unapologetically absurd premise). There are a few standard 80s cop movie jokes about the ridiculous weapons that are being confiscated from street gangs (a bazooka, a military grade flamethrower). In short, the film did everything I expected it to, a little better than I expected it to.

I liked the movie. It was sort of like the highly underappreciated Cousin Larry to Repo Man's Balki Bortokomous. It was perhaps the most pleasing combination of cops, guns, yuppies, space aliens, and Ferraris I've ever seen. In some more perfect world, the "cop buddy movie with aliens, Ferraris, yuppies, and guns" is not just a recognized cinematic formula but is, in fact, the 3rd most popular genre behind only "movies about valley girls in post-apocalyptic settings", and "romantic comedies about teenagers who have to band together to overthrow an alien invasion." But here, in this tragically ordinary emanation of that sublime possible world, The Hidden pretty much stands alone.





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* Sadly, neither Human Switchboard nor The Surfing Brides make an appearance.