The Hidden & Fallen
This week's movie rental is actually a two-for ... The Hidden, a little known 1986 science fiction film which stars Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Nouri, and Claudia Christian (of B5 fame) .... and Fallen, a 1998 occult thriller starring Denzel Washington, John Goodman, and Donald Sutherland There is a reason for mentioning these two films in one post - they both deal with serial killers (one an alien, and the other a fallen angel) who possess a number of hapless and innocent people as their hosts while they go on their killing sprees.
Fallen ....
- Denzel Washinton as a cop on the trail of a fallen angel
This film has the more well-known actors, and if you like religious themes, this one might be the one for you. Denzel plays homicide detective John Hobbes (John Goodman plays his partner and Sutherland his boss) who has just captured a murderer. After the execution of same, more killings with an identical MO are committed, and Hobbes thinks there's a copycat. His investigation leads in other directions, however, and along the way he meets the daughter of a dead cop who's obsessed with angels. One of those angels is "fallen" and possesses people, using their bodies to do its dirty work. Hobbes doesn't believe her at first, but soon her theory becomes inescapable. The acting is fine and the idea interesting, but it's scary. Here's a little bit from Roger Ebert's review of it ...
Fallen is the kind of horror story I most enjoy, set in ordinary and realistic circumstances, with a villain who lives mostly in our minds. Movies like this play with our apprehensions, instead of slamming us with freaky special effects. By suggesting that the evil resides in the real world, they make everything scary ..... Having established the possibility of the supernatural, Fallen is at pains to center Hobbes firmly in a real world. The screenplay, by Oscar nominee Nicholas Kazan (Reversal of Fortune), shows us Hobbes at home (he lives with his brother and nephew) and at work (Jonsey is a good pal, but a lieutenant played by Donald Sutherland seems to know more than he says). The story develops along the lines of a police procedural, with the cops investigating some strange murders, including a corpse left in a bathtub while the killer apparently enjoyed a leisurely breakfast .....
Among the characters Hobbes encounters on his search for missing threads, the most interesting is the daughter (Embeth Davidtz) of a cop who committed suicide after being accused of the kinds of offenses that Hobbes himself now seems to face. "If you value your life, if there's even one human being you care about," she tells him, "walk away from this case." Did her father leave a warning behind? What is the meaning of the word "Alazel" scrawled on the wall of the basement where he killed himself? .....
Fallen was directed by Gregory Hoblit, who also made Primal Fear (1996). Both films contain characters who are not as they seem, and leads who are blind-sided by them. Fallen reaches further, but doesn't achieve as much; the idea is better than the execution, and by the end, the surprises become too mechanical and inevitable. Still, for an hour Fallen develops quietly and convincingly, and it never slips down into easy shock tactics. Kazan writes plausible, literate dialogue and Hoblit creates a realistic world, so that the horror never seems, as it does in less ambitious thrillers, to feel at home.
The Hidden ...
- Kyle MacLachlan's character tries to destroy the bad alien before he himself perishes
Of the two movies, this is my favorite. Michael Nouri plays Sgt. Tom Beck, on the trail of, you guessed it, a serial killer. In the middle of his investigation, FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher, played by Kyle MacLachlan, joins the hunt. The FBI guy is a little strange ... he has information he shouldn't and is acting just weird ... so Beck has him checked out and learns Agent Gallagher has actually been deceased for some time, murdered by the very killer Beck's now after. While time is wasted as MacLachlan's character (an alien) tries to win back Beck's trust, the killer (another alien) is leaving dead bodies in his wake ... his victims and his used-up hosts, one of which is a stripper played by Christian. This film isn't as grim as Fallen ... there's the pathos of MacLachlan's character having lost his family to the killer, but there's also humor, as when the killer uses duct tape to bind up his degenerating host body .... the ending is also more upbeat. And did I mention Kyle MacLachlan? Here's a quote on the film from Roger Ebert's review of it ...
"The Hidden" takes this situation [alien possessed serial killer] and makes a surprisingly effective film out of it, a sleeper that talks like a thriller and walks like a thriller, but has more brains than the average thriller. It also has a sense of humor, and some subtle acting by MacLachlan, whose assignment is to play a character who always is just a beat out of step ..... I don't know what I was expecting, but certainly not this original and efficient thriller.
For those interested, you can see a YouTube of the beginning of The Hidden here.
Fallen ....
- Denzel Washinton as a cop on the trail of a fallen angel
This film has the more well-known actors, and if you like religious themes, this one might be the one for you. Denzel plays homicide detective John Hobbes (John Goodman plays his partner and Sutherland his boss) who has just captured a murderer. After the execution of same, more killings with an identical MO are committed, and Hobbes thinks there's a copycat. His investigation leads in other directions, however, and along the way he meets the daughter of a dead cop who's obsessed with angels. One of those angels is "fallen" and possesses people, using their bodies to do its dirty work. Hobbes doesn't believe her at first, but soon her theory becomes inescapable. The acting is fine and the idea interesting, but it's scary. Here's a little bit from Roger Ebert's review of it ...
Fallen is the kind of horror story I most enjoy, set in ordinary and realistic circumstances, with a villain who lives mostly in our minds. Movies like this play with our apprehensions, instead of slamming us with freaky special effects. By suggesting that the evil resides in the real world, they make everything scary ..... Having established the possibility of the supernatural, Fallen is at pains to center Hobbes firmly in a real world. The screenplay, by Oscar nominee Nicholas Kazan (Reversal of Fortune), shows us Hobbes at home (he lives with his brother and nephew) and at work (Jonsey is a good pal, but a lieutenant played by Donald Sutherland seems to know more than he says). The story develops along the lines of a police procedural, with the cops investigating some strange murders, including a corpse left in a bathtub while the killer apparently enjoyed a leisurely breakfast .....
Among the characters Hobbes encounters on his search for missing threads, the most interesting is the daughter (Embeth Davidtz) of a cop who committed suicide after being accused of the kinds of offenses that Hobbes himself now seems to face. "If you value your life, if there's even one human being you care about," she tells him, "walk away from this case." Did her father leave a warning behind? What is the meaning of the word "Alazel" scrawled on the wall of the basement where he killed himself? .....
Fallen was directed by Gregory Hoblit, who also made Primal Fear (1996). Both films contain characters who are not as they seem, and leads who are blind-sided by them. Fallen reaches further, but doesn't achieve as much; the idea is better than the execution, and by the end, the surprises become too mechanical and inevitable. Still, for an hour Fallen develops quietly and convincingly, and it never slips down into easy shock tactics. Kazan writes plausible, literate dialogue and Hoblit creates a realistic world, so that the horror never seems, as it does in less ambitious thrillers, to feel at home.
The Hidden ...
- Kyle MacLachlan's character tries to destroy the bad alien before he himself perishes
Of the two movies, this is my favorite. Michael Nouri plays Sgt. Tom Beck, on the trail of, you guessed it, a serial killer. In the middle of his investigation, FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher, played by Kyle MacLachlan, joins the hunt. The FBI guy is a little strange ... he has information he shouldn't and is acting just weird ... so Beck has him checked out and learns Agent Gallagher has actually been deceased for some time, murdered by the very killer Beck's now after. While time is wasted as MacLachlan's character (an alien) tries to win back Beck's trust, the killer (another alien) is leaving dead bodies in his wake ... his victims and his used-up hosts, one of which is a stripper played by Christian. This film isn't as grim as Fallen ... there's the pathos of MacLachlan's character having lost his family to the killer, but there's also humor, as when the killer uses duct tape to bind up his degenerating host body .... the ending is also more upbeat. And did I mention Kyle MacLachlan? Here's a quote on the film from Roger Ebert's review of it ...
"The Hidden" takes this situation [alien possessed serial killer] and makes a surprisingly effective film out of it, a sleeper that talks like a thriller and walks like a thriller, but has more brains than the average thriller. It also has a sense of humor, and some subtle acting by MacLachlan, whose assignment is to play a character who always is just a beat out of step ..... I don't know what I was expecting, but certainly not this original and efficient thriller.
For those interested, you can see a YouTube of the beginning of The Hidden here.
posted by crystal | 6:51 PM
2 Comments:
Never seen The Hidden but enjoyed Fallen very much. The Rolling Stones' 'Sympathy for the Devil' and the final twist that throws the whole storyline on it's head is actually kind of fun in a macabre/terror generating kind of way.
Hi Curw,
Yes, kind of like The Sixth Sense, in a way, with that ending. And I always like Denzel Washington.
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