You’ve probably seen this one mentioned on nostalgia sites, right? It often gets dropped in the same breath as Pretty in Pink, like it was always right there in the conversation, another beloved Jon Cryer joint from the golden age of teen comedies. A film we all rented one Saturday afternoon and fell in love with. That soundtrack, with that song. You know the one. You can probably picture the VHS cover right now, can’t you?
Yeah, I don’t remember any of that either. What gives?
I didn’t see Hiding Out in theaters. I don’t remember ads for it. I don’t remember it on video store shelves. I don’t remember anyone at school talking about it. I didn’t even know it existed until I stumbled across it on IMDB sometime in the early 2000s, when that site was still small enough that you could read through every trivia section of every movie that had one, which I absolutely did. And right there in Jon Cryer’s filmography, wedged between Pretty in Pink and the beginning of his television career, were two films I had never heard of. Hiding Out, and something called Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home. I had no memory of either. No pop cultural residue at all. It was like they’d been retconned into existence like Buffy’s sister.
Morgan Stewart especially piqued my curiosity, because the director credit read Alan Smithee, and an Alan Smithee film is always worth a look, if only to see how bad the damage is. Even during the great VHS-to-DVD migration of the early 2000s, when thrift stores were getting inundated with tapes that people were trading up for shiny discs, I couldn’t land a copy of either film outside of an overpriced German ex-rental on eBay. These movies were genuinely hard to track down. There’s a reason for that, of course.
Three letters and one year. DEG. 1987.
Hiding Out was distributed by the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, Dino’s attempt at an independent studio to rival the majors out of Wilmington, North Carolina. By August of 1987, DEG was 16.5 million in debt. Hiding Out hit theaters on November 6th, and only made about $7 million total, and exactly one month later, on December 4th, DEG halted all theatrical distribution. They filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy a few months later.
The home video rights got sold to Paravision, a subsidiary of L’Oréal, then bounced to Canal+, then to StudioCanal, with Lionsgate eventually picking up the video rights like they did with every mini-major catalog. But it spent years in corporate limbo with maybe a bargain basement pressing here and there. I’ve not seen them.
A proper DVD didn’t surface until around 2009, twenty-two years after the film came out. You can understand why nobody was passing this around at sleepovers in 1988.
Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home had it even worse. It was filmed in 1985, and the director was fired four weeks into shooting. His replacement asked to have his name removed from the credits, hence the Alan Smithee. It was released in February of 1987 by a company called New Century Vista, and opened to a paltry weekend gross of $48,438. That’s not just a flop, that’s a film that played in maybe a dozen theaters and crawled to $2.1 million. The VHS came out through HBO Video in 1989 and that was more or less the end of it until the internet dug it back up.
So when I see these “underrated” or “hidden gems” films talked about like they were part of everyone’s childhood, I get a little twitchy. I cynically cast serious doubts on anyone who remembers renting Hiding Out from their local video store in the late eighties. Even though plenty of people did, I’m sure.
It had real fans, absolutely, I’m told it got substantial time under the Cable heat lamp, but if you were one of the lucky ones who caught it in theaters during its one month of distribution support, or managed to score a tape during what may have been its only production run on shelves before the company went kaput, you had something genuinely rare. You’re the real deal.
The 80s produced a very specific kind of teen comedy that I loved. The outsider from another reality who ends up navigating high school, finding some personal growth, and accidentally becoming the coolest person in the building while helping a nerdy kid out. Back to the Future, The Heavenly Kid, Mischief, Encino Man all made it happen to some degree. Hiding Out does it with Jon Cryer as a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker on the run from the mob who dyes his hair, enrolls as a senior, and starts giving tax advice to his girlfriend’s dad. And Keith Coogan, legendary doer of dishes, is a welcome sight outside of the babysitting movies.
When I finally watched Hiding Out properly, years after discovering it existed, I got why the retroactive nostalgia had taken hold even if most of it seemed manufactured. Because it does feel like an old favourite. It has the fashion, the attitudes, the soundtrack, the familiar faces in unfamiliar roles. It sits nicely on the video shelf between The Secret of My Success or Can’t Buy Me Love and it feels like it was always there.
That’s the cool thing about discovering a film decades after it should have found you. You watch it and you feel like you’re watching an old favourite.
I could have used this movie in 1987.
But some of the films you loved as a kid, you don’t actually discover until you’re in your thirties. Or later. You just get to retroactively slot them into your childhood favourites and enjoy pretending they were always there.
-Pop
Hiding Out arrived on home video this week in 1988, after a November 6th, 1987 theatrical release.