The Southern Highland Reader

CULLOWHEE--As part of its “Cold Case” series, which is “dedicated to rediscovering underrated and undervalued films and those who made them”, Movieline.com ran a June feature on The Hidden, a 1980’s “schlocktail” about L.A. cops in hot pursuit of a body-swapping alien.

Jack Sholder, head of the Motion Picture & Television Production program at Western Carolina University, directed the film. He did the work hot on the heels of his success with the lucrative A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, and he told Movieline.com what drew him to the script for The Hidden: “It had a wicked sense of humor, the cop thing going, and it had some heart to it,” Sholder said. “And there were sequences I just wanted to see.”

Here’s how Movieline describes the film:

Our antagonist is a slimy spider-slug who finds cardiac patients and bouffanted strippers the warmest place to hide, and who delights in shooting the shit out of police stations. Earth’s only hope is Michael Nouri’s take-no-crap homicide detective and Kyle MacLachlan’s oddball FBI agent, a character he’d later refine in Twin Peaks. Their tongue-in-cheek rapport and the film’s raucous energy make The Hidden an intoxicating schlocktail, but the movie was a box-office non-starter in the year of Predator, Lethal Weapon… and the Wall Street crash, which happened the week it released.

Another excerpt:

While The Hidden struggled theatrically, the industry loved it. “I became a hot commodity for a while,” Sholder remembered. But he still played hard-to-get, culminating in his declining the sequel to Gremlins, then Warner Bros. highest-grossing film. “I would’ve been in the big-time studio business,” he said. “I kick myself for not doing it but… I had so little passion for it that I might’ve made a completely rotten movie.”

Read the whole piece here.

View a trailer and the well-remembered car chase from The Hidden below.