“Woof-woof! I want to die!” – The people involved in the making of this film.
The Hidden 2: F
I thought I wanted more from The Hidden, but I have changed my mind. It was stupid of me to want such a thing. It was fine the way it was and I don’t want any more Hidden. I should have been satisfied with a berserk alien movie that celebrates its own shamelessness as a ripoff of other science fiction horror movies. But I greedily wanted more and look what happened: The (fucking terrible) Hidden 2.
I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but the alien from the first film left behind some eggs. The eggs hatch in this one and they do pretty much the same thing their dad did: they possess a bunch of people and go on visceral crime-sprees with all the ambition of a cracked-out Jeff Goldblum-style Death Wish goon.
The cover of the VHS says “They live for lust. They live for power. They live forever.” I assume they are talking about the newly-hatched parasites, but that makes zero fucking sense because a) they are not sexual at all, b) they just want to do stuff like eat cheeseburgers and steal cars, and c) there is no mention of any sort of immortality, and their lives are actually very easily ended with the stupid ray gun that the stupid Good Alien has.
Maybe the tagline is talking about the new Good Alien and his human love interest. They hook up, but they have about as much on-screen sexual chemistry as a pile of wet rags. And I’m not talking about those sexy rags. I mean unsexy rags. It’s Alien Seedall over again, and this is a movie that you do not want to be compared to on any level.
The guy from Carnosauris in it. So it’s got that going for it… I guess.
I am not even exaggerating when I say that about twenty minutes of this movie are totally unaltered scenes from the first Hidden movie. They seriously edit in a LONG clip from the first movie and pass it off as an “intro” to the sequel. Then they throw in another generous clip as a “flashback.” Then (I’m not joking) they have the audacity add ANOTHER clip in the form of our heroes reviewing VHS security camera footage from the climax of the first movie. It is pretty lame. All in all, The Hidden 2 is maybe 60 minutes of original content.
And the content sucks ass.
The same brainless “homages” to Terminator and The Thingare there and they are somehow worse. There is even a scene where a dog gets possessed and there is a gross dog transformation scene like the gross dog transformation scene from The Thing. There are also some terminator-esque “files” that the Good Aliens accesses. I’m surprised there wasn’t “alien-vision” that ripped off all the first person Terminator shots. The parasites carry out some attacks outside of their hosts (like the face-huggers from Alien! Holy shit, am I just now noticing another case of plagiarism?), but they look like cheap puppets that someone threw at the actors.
The layers of meaninglessness to the movie have basically made me a level-10 nihilist. It is a shamelessly unoriginal sequel to a shamelessly unoriginal movie. The hatchlings have all the same abilities/criminal inclinations as before and there is a Good Alien with a Special Gun hunting them with the help of an “I don’t believe it!” human sidekick.
Socrates: Glaucon, my dear friend, I am curious about this film we’ve recently viewed together, The Hidden. It appears to be an amalgamation of borrowed elements from other movies, yet I enjoyed the film while you did not. Tell me, in your view, what is the essence of this cinematic creation on which you base your logic?
Glaucon: Socrates, it is a tired blend of familiar concepts. It borrows the premise of “Good Guy vs. Bad Guy from Another World” from my favorite film The Terminator and the idea of “Who’s the Monster in the Room?” from my other favorite movie The Thing. These elements, combined with mediocre production quality akin to Chuck Norris movies from this era, form a somewhat mindless experience that lasts for a full 90 minutes, yet I must admit I found it difficult to look away, which I cannot explain.
Socrates: Fascinating, indeed. But what strikes me as curious is that despite its conscious replication of other films, The Hidden garners widespread respect and praise. From esteemed critics like Roger Ebert to the faceless reviewers on Amazon.com, the film is spoken highly of. Do you not find it perplexing that a work that, as you believe, strips away the depth and meaning from its source material is celebrated as a solid film? How can you explain this paradox, Glaucon?
Glaucon: Indeed, Socrates, The Hidden deliberately replicates the plots and tropes of The Terminator and The Thing, yet it lacks the deeper allegorical and philosophical messages present in those films. While one may argue that these aspects were superficial in the aforementioned works, they were at least present and readable to some extent. The Hidden, however, revels in the futility of its own repetitive violence.
Socrates: Ah, an interesting observation, my friend. It appears you believe that The Hidden indulges in gratuitous destruction without offering any profound reflections on the human condition. I would like to return to this point in a moment, but if I may inquire further, could you shed light on the facets of the film’s premise – this tale of a parasitic alien criminal who possesses human hosts – that inspired your condemnation?
Glaucon: This is easy, Socrates! This alien parasite displays impulsive behavior, akin to the uncontrolled desires of the human Id, going on a rampage through the lens of a cheaply produced film. Possessing various hosts, the creature behaves in an extremely destructive and distressed state, as if consumed by the effects of methamphetamine. The campy depiction of a spree of grand theft auto, armed robbery, and assault is not art. The violence is meaningless and we’ve seen it in hundreds of other films before. It is not original.
Socrates: I see. I recall that this alien parasite indulges in hedonistic destruction, slaying characters who embody the stereotypes of the 1980s, while also partaking in activities such as feasting on steaks and pilfering boom-boxes through a lens of stylized violence that resembles episodes from other works. Verily, it appears that originality is absent within this film, yet, it possesses a certain degree of amusement which you concede when you admit you cannot look away as the film plays. Glaucon, I must inquire: do you truly believe that the absence of originality diminishes the value of this film? And do you then, by extension, believe that the absence of originality in any work of art diminishes the value of that art?
Glaucon: I do, Socrates.
Socrates: I believe you must now see how you are wrong. While I understand the importance of originality in art, I believe it is also crucial to consider the role of the demands of the audience. Is it not true that the greatness of a work lies not solely in its originality, but in its ability to fulfill the needs and desires of its viewers?
Glaucon: Pray tell, how can a film lacking originality still be considered great?
Socrates: Consider this, Glaucon. The Hidden, though borrowing heavily from other sources, manages to captivate its audience through familiarity. Is any great art truly original, or does it owe a debt to the art that came before it?
Glaucon: Great art is original.
Socrates: Well then your favorite movie must therefore be original art in order to be great. Is The Terminator the first movie ever about robots? Or the first movie with the foreboding threat of apocalypse? Is it Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first starring role? Is it the first film about time travel?
Glaucon: No.
Socrates: And is The Thing the first movie about a man-killing alien? Is it the first horror movie built on isolation and paranoia? Is The Thing not a complete remake of an already existing film which itself is based off of a short story?
Glaucon: I think I am beginning to understand, Socrates. Great art can be original. But by drawing upon established tropes and delivering them in a manner that satisfies the desires of its viewers, it fulfills a specific need within the cinematic landscape. But are you suggesting, Socrates, that the value of a work of art lies in its ability to cater to the public? Is there not room for innovation or organic creativity?
Socrates: Ah, Glaucon, you raise a valid point. Indeed, innovation and creativity are important aspects of artistic expression. However, we must not disregard the impact of meeting the public’s desires and, vitally, how a filmmaker’s receptive observations of the time in which they live informs the way they see fit to satisfy these desires.
Glaucon: Go on…
Socrates: Great works of art can be born from striking a delicate balance between originality and familiarity, between creativity and satisfying the audience’s yearning for certain elements. In the case of The Hidden, you have explained how the film’s own overt commitment to a lack of originality makes it uniquely original in and of itself through its quite deliberate intent to deliver concentrated dosages of most beloved elements of previous works of art. Is this not what many great works of art do? Just how The Terminator and The Thing borrow from works that came before them, they do so in their own unique ways that are in tune with the public, making them original.
Glaucon: So, Socrates, you argue that greatness can be achieved by recognizing the needs of the public and fulfilling them effectively? And that this effective fulfillment is itself a work of original art?
Socrates: Precisely, Glaucon. The greatness of a work lies not solely in its originality but in its reception to the needs of the public. It is through this symbiotic relationship between artist and audience that true greatness can be attained. Perhaps this is what you could not look away while we viewed the film!
Glaucon: Your words shed new light on the matter, Socrates. The value of a work of art should be assessed not only through its originality but also by its resonance with the public, especially if this is done with such deliberate force that the result could be called original. It is in this balance that we find the true essence of greatness.
Yes, this is the movie where Scarlett Johansson gets naked. Yes, it is also a pretty good movie that you should watch for reasons other than just the nude scenes. Again, yes, this is the movie where Scarlett Johansson gets naked.
What an extreme “don’t talk to strangers” cautionary tale. Johansson plays a seductive alien who drives around looking for dudes to lure back to her lair where she leads them into a vat of black goo that dissolves everything except their skin. You never see her do anything with their skin, but you know at some point she is going to wear it, or one of her alien homies is going to wear it. Underneath all that Johansson, is a really grotesque alien.
At first glance, the movie is really repetitive; the driving/seducing/goo takes up a good half of the film and the scenes are all really similar: Johansson drives up to whomever looks the loneliest, charms them into her van (and then to her lair), and then the next thing you know, the poor guy has a raging boner and is following naked Johansson (did I mention there are nude scenes?) until he realizes he’s in black goo, sinking like rock in quicksand. His face melts into disappointment; this was NOT covered in sex-ed!
What’s fun about this repetition is the tension. After you see one guy swallowed by the black goo, the rest of her seductions are rife with fucking evil dramatic irony. We know that if she gets a dude in the van, it’s black goo time, but all he can think about is naked Johansson, even though there is something sort of… off about her. All you can think about naked Johansson too, but you know there is also black goo. The music during the black goo parts is eerie and there are some uncomfortable first-person shots. I liked it.
What’s extra fucked up is the fact that a lot of the footage of her failing to convince a guy to hop in the van is actually footage of her asking real pedestrians, in real life, to hop in her van for a ride. A lot of guys turned Johansson down for a weird van ride and their nervous refusals are included in the film. So when you see her hungrily asking a dude to get in her van to hang out, and the guy says, “no Scarlett Johansson, I do not want to hang out with you,” it’s real! Fucking idiots.
Like I said, the drawn out and suspenseful seductions take up a lot of time, but the formula changes when the alien starts to have what appears to be an existential crisis. “Why am I getting naked and luring lonely guys into black goo?!” It doesn’t end well.
The majority of the director’s credits include music videos, which winds up being a good thing. The movie looks fucking awesome (Even scenes that don’t involve naked Johansson. There, I said it.). The shots are all carefully framed, there are those gnarly first-person sequences, and Johansson fluctuates between flawless and grotesque, angelic and demonic through isolating tracking shots and unflattering close-ups.
Some typical party-teens attend a typical teen house party when they are suddenly zapped back in time by about an hour or two. They are still at the party, but now they’re watching their past selves arrive and do all the typical teen house party shenanigans which they themselves did only hours before!
Every few minutes, the past house party zaps forward in time, so the zapped-forward teens watch their past selves “catch up” with them. With every flash-forward, additional guests from the party are duplicated and displaced in time. This gets the teens worried that once time “catches up,” they will merge with their past selves or maybe cease to exist.
The past doubles of the teens also act a little fishy and get the time-displaced teens worried that these might not be past versions of themselves, but alien doppelgangers who are bending space-time in order to steal their lives.
Here are some of the existential conundrums the movie presents:
If you could get back with your girlfriend by murdering your past self and then murdering her future self, would you?
If you had the chance, would you do that Bill Murray shit from Groundhog’s Day where you use your knowledge from the past to manipulate women?
Who would win in a fight: you right now, or you one hour ago?
If you stand near the place where your past self will be zapped forward through space-time, will the two of you become a fucking DUMB LOOKING conjoined twin thing?
What happens if you pour vodka in your eye? Will it get you laid?
What would happen if you ran into a tool shed to hide from a rift in space-time?
Would you eat sushi off of a stranger’s genitals? What if there was time travel involved?
Would you make out with your past self?
Would you make out with your future self?
If you made out with yourself from a different dimension, would the result be the two of you harmoniously merging into a smirking version of yourself?
Fucking boring!
If you hate annoying teen house party movies, imagine watching one where THE SAME SCENES HAPPEN TWICE with the only difference being someone LOOKING UPSET while it happens. It’s like some annoying bro took a philosophy class and made this movie.
There’s this one scene where a bunch of people hide in a shed, but the past gets zapped into the shed and there’s a bunch of fights to the death. Then you don’t know who’s left standing: past versions or present versions of annoying teens.
Ah, Breeders: the horror movie that unashamedly delivers monsters, college girls, and monsters molesting college girls without taking itself seriously for a single nanosecond.
There’s this alien monster. Let’s call him Breeder. Why? Because he dwells in a labyrinth catacomb underneath a girls boarding school and uses fragments from his glowing meteorite to breed with college girls.
Breeder’s meteorite chunks are very attractive looking and so, in a classic case of reckless hubris, a flock of hot college chicks transform the shards into necklaces for themselves. They probably lie to all their friends and say they got the crystals at Burning Man.
The hot girls don’t realize that their space-rock necklaces will put them under the telepathic control of Breeder, who is going to make them (one-by-one, over the course of about 50 real slow minutes) climb into giant (lame looking) cocoons under their school so he can impregnate them. What a dick! Breeder is basically an intergalactic date rapist! I bet those meteor chunks won’t even show up on a TOX screen in a forensics lab. Someone has to stop this perv!
Some (literally) panty-sniffing professor who looks like a wholesome, sweater-wearing Sears model SOME-FUCKING-HOW figures out the ridiculous plot I just described to you and he descends to the tunnels under the school to stop Breeder and rescue the hot girls, one of whom he is banging. I guess this makes him an anti-hero but, trust me, it doesn’t add any notable depth to his piece of shit character. 1997 was a crazy year.
Cue 25 minute cat-and-mouse scene that is about as exciting as moss on a tree stump. It’s like when they’re looking for the Alien in the movie Alien except there isn’t any suspense, high-tech radar equipment, spaceship setting, good acting, or moment of brilliantly eerie silence. Breeder lumbers out from behind corners and roars like a fucking panther. He suffers from Looks-Like-a-Power-Ranger-Villain syndrome. People trip over cocoons and space snot. And, yes, what you’ve been hoping for happens: Breeder touches some girl’s boobs. Are you happy? You disgust me.
This is a variation of The Brood and Children of the Corn that features telepathic blonde kids who have long-term plans for world domination and short-term plans for hurting/terrifying rednecks.
There’s this little town with a population of 2,000. One day, everyone in the city limits passes out for a few hours. There’s a real Under the Dome vibe as law enforcement even paints a border around the coma zone, marking lines that, once crossed, cause people to faint. When everyone wakes up, ten women are pregnant, several of whom have legitimate excuses for how they couldn’t have gotten pregnant.
Some weirdly autonomous, chain-smoking government agent, Kirstie Alley, shows up and takes a creepy interest in the immaculate coma-conceptions. She convinces the women to carry the mystery kids to term and then even personally helps in the delivery room (all the births happen at once), punctuating the ordeal with her nihilistic wise-cracks and power-smirk. You can tell she isn’t to be trusted because she smokes, wears sunglasses indoors, and always wears black.
Nine kids are born and one is still-born. SPOILER: The dead baby looks like an alien fetus and Kirstie Alley keeps it in a pickle jar in her basement so she can look at it and, I think, ponder her own cosmic insignificance.
Then something stranger than any of the coma-pregnancy alien fetus stuff happens: the film flashes forward several years to show the nine kids, all Aryan looking toddlers, existing as acknowledged telepaths with a dominant choke-hold on the town. No one openly fucks with the kids because they will telepathically make you jump off of a cliff or telepathically stick your arm in boiling water. Why wouldn’t they show us the townsfolk realizing that they have creepy telepaths on their hands? Why wouldn’t they show the power-plays the kids must have used to take control? THAT sounds like an interesting story. Instead, the rest of the movie is the kids being mean to / killing people and fucking Kirstie Alley smirking.
Christopher Reeve is the only one who has any success blocking the kids’ mind-reading so the town nominates him as the kids’ special tutor and he decides the best course of action would be to suicide bomb them. Mark Hamill is a priest who is bothered by everything.
The kids reveal they are aliens with similar telepathic colonies set up elsewhere on Earth. Kirstie Alley reveals that the government knows all about it and that she has a little alien fetus in her basement. John Carpenter reveals that he is a badass with belligerent synth music but inept as fuck with an acoustic guitar.
The Transporter and Natasha Henstridge play some cops in the future who have to go to colonized future Mars because future Ice Cube, a real badass future criminal, is awaiting an interplanetary transfer to another futuristic prison. It’s directed by John Carpenter and takes place in the future.
The future cops and Ice Cube have to team up to fight some disembodied spirits of an ancient Martian race that have been possessing some colonial miners, turning them into self-mutilating murderous psychos.
What could go wrong, right? Entertaining cast and an awesome director, right? Well Natasha Henstrisge doesn’t do any sexy-violent stuff, The Transporter doesn’t roundhouse kick anyone, and Ice Cube doesn’t rap or have any cool one-liners. The pace is boring as fuck and the possessed miners look like The Crow with infected botox injections in their foreheads and a bunch of dumb hieroglyphics burned on their cheeks. They look like Marilyn Manson if he conditioned his hair and stuck his head in a waffle iron.
I have heard the film described as a misunderstood homage to Carpenter’s own Assault on Precinct 13, which I think is a pretty superficial stretch. Maybe I am “misunderstanding.” Sure there are cops being attacked by a seemingly endless army of bad guys, but that’s where the similarities end as far as I can tell. I think it shares more with Pitch Black (which was released only months before) where the future cops have to team up with future Vin Diesel to battle the army of scary aliens on the foreign planet.
The Martian spirits are a malevolent cloud of dust that floats out of a subterranean door. Even if you kill one of the possessed motherfuckers, all you really did was release the Martian spirit dust so it can go possess someone else. The not-possessed people learn this rule, yet they continue to bust lethal caps in the Martian assailants. They decide to blow up the dust and the ending is basically one big drawn out “run away from the explosion we started” followed by a Shyamalanian zinger that you probably won’t care about.
This is a movie based on a Stephen King novel, so you already know it has about a 75% chance of sucking pretty bad ass. Guess what? It doesn’t beat the odds. Dreamcatcher was a fucking nightmare in which several talented actors are trapped in a convoluted mash-up of old Stephen King ideas, PG13 action movie cliches, and CGI aliens that crawl out of rectums.
Some childhood friends get together for a snowy weekend of male bonding in a secluded cabin. No rectums involved yet, but just you wait! It is slowly revealed to the audience that the buddies share a telepathic bond.
The testosterone and wasted movie minutes really start to flow and then some stranger covered in a weird fungus shows up and dies, really bumming everyone out. Even worse, a worm-like alien organism slithers out of the corpse’s butthole and starts killing the friends. The butthole alien, which resembles a three foot long hookworm with rows of shark teeth, kills Jason Lee and some other guy and then lays eggs / farts fungus all over the cabin. For a few minutes, it is trapped in a toilet, which I guess is supposed to be ironic because it came out of some dude’s asshole. How clever! Luckily, the cabin gets burned down later, cooking the alien/fungus/larva to death and saving dozens of human buttholes from future shredding and saving the movie from something possibly exciting happening.
Then some larger alien calling himself “Mr. Grey” possesses the body of Sgt. Brody from Homeland, who narrowly avoided being slaughtered by the anal eel back at the cabin. Mr. Grey wants to contaminate the water supply in Boston with worms and have a big sphincter-shredding party. Sounds good to me at this point because so far, not much has happened.
As Brody’s Mr. Grey-controlled body treks to Boston, Brody has an internal struggle with the alien in a metaphorical mental “library” that houses all of Brody’s memories. Mr. Grey is rummaging around in Brody’s head looking for a specific memory. You find out later what it is. It has nothing to do with buttholes. Or dreamcatchers.
The military gets involved, some people get infected with the fungus and get “quarantined.” Many of the infected are exterminated because this secret branch of the military is familiar with the fungus which matures into the angry butthole worm. “Angry Butthole Worm” would be a pretty cool band name, by the way.
Come to find out, one of the friends was secretly an alien… a good alien disguised as an autistic dude! Not some cavity eel that sprays moss everywhere and bites people. We learn that Mr. Grey was looking for the memories associated with this benevolent alien friend, who also gave everyone their telepathic powers. At the last minute, good alien reveals himself, battles Mr. Grey at the reservoir, and stops the water supply / butthole murder plan. The CGI fight scene thankfully lasts just a few seconds.
If you were already at the end of your rope with this messy shit, sorry: The product of the CGI alien fight is a big CGI explosion that looks like a dreamcatcher and there’s no more butthole stuff.
The fraternal childhood bond, flashbacks, and subversive alien plot remind me of It, Tommyknockers, and Stand By Me. The direction was nothing special and all of the worms look like that really liquidy CGI from the late 90’s.
BLOODCRYPT 