- Adaptation Displacement: At this point, any individual who talks about "The Hidden" is more likely talking about the game mod based on the film than the film itself.
- Best Known for the Fanservice: For Babylon 5 fans, this is the movie where Claudia Christian plays a stripper.
- Complete Monster: The unnamed parasitic lifeform takes over the bodies of other sapient beings so that it can go on a violent crime spree, taking whatever it wants and killing anyone who gets in the way, purely for fun. The host bodies are discarded by the alien when they finally become so damaged that it needs to jump into a new host. During its murderous rampage throughout Los Angeles, it kills many dozens of people through methods varying from shooting, bludgeoning, stabbing, and vehicular homicide, having no compunctions with murdering children or the infirm either. The good body-controlling alien in the film, an extraterrestrial police officer, has been pursuing the evil alien ever since it killed his family and his police partner on another planet, which the evil alien is only too happy to remind him of when they confront each other. The alien's ultimate plan is to take over the body of a U.S. Senator so it can become President Evil.
- Evil Is Cool: The Ax-Crazy alien antagonist, due to its taste in heavy metal music, fast Ferrari sports cars and being a chilling Creepy Monotone Made of Iron Implacable Man alone.
- Fanon Discontinuity: Sequel? What sequel?
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Kyle MacLachlan plays an alien protector who arrives on Earth to defend it from an alien threat, decades later, Kyle would voice the iconic extraterrestrial guardian that we all know and love who would also join with the other heroes to fight another alien threat in the direct-to-DVD animated film Justice League: The New Frontier.
- This film will not be the only time Ed O'Ross would fight an alien menace while on duty.
- Danny Trejo in one of his early roles during The '80s plays an inmate who falls victim to the alien Big Bad after calling it out, Trejo would later appear in the 2010 film Predators, where he plays another criminal who is killed by an alien antagonist in a film that is the second sequel to another alien invasion action-horror movie Predator, which was released in 1987, that same year this film came out.
- A weird FBI agent from Seattle, played by Kyle MacLachlan, joins forces with a hard nosed, curly haired local cop to stop a serial killer that jumps from body to body.
- An alien criminal robs banks, guns down innocent civilians, steals expensive cars and takes them on high-speed joyrides, and he does it all For the Lulz. Take the alien part out of the equation, what does this sound like to you?
- Kyle MacLachlan plays a host to an alien controlling his actions and would later transfer himself into a father who has a wife and a little girl, then decades later MacLachlan plays a father with a wife and a little girl which the latter has her actions controlled by a collective of characters in the Disney/Pixar film Inside Out.
- Retroactive Recognition: An early in his career Danny Trejo, as a nameless inmate who gets plugged when he calls The Parasite a hippie during its shooting rampage.
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