Another movie that I had never heard of until it showed up TCM and that I recorded because the synopsis sounded interesting was the 1980s genre mashup The Hidden. Not long ago I got around to watching it, so now I can do the review of it here.
The opening credits play out over security camera footage of a Los Angeles bank, and as the credits roll, a man enters the bank and robs it fairly violently, shooting several people quite dead, before he spots that security camera, shooting out the lens which also coincided with the end of the opening credits. The robber then exits the bank, gets into his Ferrari, and drives off at a high rate of speed. Several witnesses outside the bank see all of this, and are able to give the cops a good description of the car as well as the guy who got in and drove off, since the robber did nothing to make himself inconspicuous and didn't wear a mask.
The robber, a man named DeVries who until recently had no criminal record, leads the police on a high-speed chase until Detective Tom Beck (Michael Nouri) sets up a road block that's sure to get DeVries. The cops start shooting at DeVries as he approaches the road block, although that doesn't have too much effect on him. A bigger effect is when DeVries finally crashes the Ferrari, which shortly thereafter catches fire. DeVries is taken to the hospital where the doctors don't expect him to live.
Back at the station, Beck works on writing up the case while a politician who may be running for president wants to use Beck as part of his security detail, which Beck's boss Masterson is opposed to since Beck is his best detective. Masterson has less choice in the matter, however, when an FBI agent, Lloyd Gallagher (Kyle MacLachlan), shows up from Seattle needing a detective with local knowledge to help work on a case that just happens to be the Devries case. Not that Beck can figure out why this is a federal case (he wasn't thinking about the bank robbery, which is something that would bring the feds in).
Meanwhile, over at the hospital, DeVries is put in a regular intensive care room with another very sick patient, without any sort of police guard which seems like a terrible violation of protocol. DeVries seems about to die until, suddenly, he wakes up bolting upright and approaching the other patient. Some sort of very large tentacled creature crawls out of DeVries' mouth and enters the other patien's mouth. DeVries is no longer of any use and dies, while the other guy, Jonathan Miller, walks out the hospital seemingly health.
But Miller suddenly also stars committing all sorts of crimes. When Gallagher gets to the hospital, he knows the score, since he's been investigating this case for years. So he knows that some sort of alien life form is able to go from one human body to another, forcing the human hosts to commit all sorts of violent crime. Not that he can convince the other police around him of what's going on. But when Beck takes Lloyd to his family's house for dinner, Beck gets the decided feeling that there's something not quite right about Gallagher. There's some fairly obvious foreshadowing here, although of course the audience is more omniscient in the regard since we're given a lot of information that the characters in the movie don't have.
The alien being goes from one human host to another, leaving a trail of violence and dead bodies in its wake. As we saw in the opening car chase, shooting the alien host doesn't have a lot of effect, and if the host does "die", the humans aren't experienced enough to know that you don't get close to the host lest it transfer the entity into a new victim.
When I did some reading on The Hidden, I found out that it's considered a cult film. Having watched it, I can see why. And to be honest, I mostly enjoyed it. It's a quirky movie that doesn't always go where you might be expecting, and has a fair bit of dark humor too. It's not without its flaws, as some of the foreshadowing gives too much away too early. But for the most part the pluses outweigh the minuses. The Hidden is definitely one worth watching.
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