Hiding Out - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Andrew Morensk (Jon Cryer) has it all figured out. He’s a young, successful stockbroker and has acquired a taste for the finer things in life. He knows a good scotch, he knows the best restaurants in town, and he’s got a client list that will keep him on a steady path to success for years to come. Until that is, when all of that goes out the window, it turns out that he and others at his firm have been unknowingly in cahoots with a gangster who’s been arrested, and they’re all witnesses. When his coworkers start going missing, he’s brought into protective custody by the FBI, whose protection only goes so far when the gangsters outgun them. Fearing for his safety, Andrew runs. He jumps on a train and skips town, meets up with his young cousin,n and adopts a new persona.

This is a long, sort of overly complicated setup to get Jon Cryer, who’s playing a character at nearly thirty years old, into high school. He takes on a fake name and enrolls in school, “hiding out,” if you will, in plain sight. The rest of the movie is a pretty typical 1980s teenage comedy-drama, not unlike your average John Hughes-flavored knockoff. While the movie is charming enough, with all of the cast really giving it their all, Hiding Out saddles its plot with a romantic storyline between Cryer and a teenage girl, Ryan (Annabeth Gish), and it’s… not great. Cryer and Gish are great together, but it’s difficult to reconcile, or turn my brain off for, because it’s just, well, kind of gross. He’s at least ten years her senior, but the movie sort of forgives this with, “But look how young he looks!”

Much of Hiding Out is an innocuous wish-fulfillment fantasy: What if you had a chance to go back to high school, but now that you’re older, and more interesting, people like you? Now you’re the most popular kid in school! I get the fantasy, but I also find the fantasy to be deeply pathetic. I couldn’t give a damn what people thought of me when I was actually 17, but I can somehow find it in me to care even less that they might think of me now.

Hiding Out is, for the most part, a perfectly pleasant, inconsequential comedy buoyed by the strength of its leads and some goofy comedy, including the young cousin played by Keith Coogan who is one of the worst drivers in the world. It’s a bummer that all this talent and all this charm had to be in this movie. Somewhere out there, in the ether of unwritten scripts, there’s a better story for all these people.

Vital Disc Stats: The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Hiding Out enrolls itself in class on 4K UHD and 1080p HD Blu-ray courtesy of Kino Lorber Studio Classics in a two-disc release. Both discs are housed in a standard case with a removable slipcover featuring identical cover artwork on both, with an abstract, blurry image of Jon Cryer and his young friends laughing and dancing. 

For this release, Hiding Out was restored in 4K from its original camera negative by StudioCanal in standard dynamic range, so there will be no Dolby Vision or HDR10 grading here. I’m not sure how much Hiding Out would have benefitted from the HDR treatment, but grading it on its own terms, it does look great. The film was shot by veteran cinematographer Daniel Pearl, who lensed both the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its 2003 remake. Like those films, colors are nice and deep (vibrant without being oversaturated) and the whole presentation is awash in a healthy layer of film grain. Fine details are clearly visible, like stitching on clothing. Closeups on actors’ faces look great, with a razor-sharp focus.

For every bit of good that the video presentation was on Hiding Out, the audio option is its exact opposite, like a kind of antimatter, or antiquality. Viewers have two options, a 2.0 stereo mix and a 5.1 surround mix, both encoded in DTS-HD MA. Of the two, the stereo option is the better one, but dialogue sounds tinny and flat. It sounds truncated somehow, like there’s a natural timbre and vibrance that’s not being fully realized. Still, dialogue clarity is elevated so it’s never difficult to hear what characters are saying, favoring it above a pretty busy mix that factors in an excellent score by Anne Dudley and slam-bang action sound effects of gunfire.

The 5.1 mix is basically unlistenable, which is… I don’t consider it a huge loss, because for movies like this, it’s probably best to be a purist and go with the original stereo mix. But, still. It’s bad. It’s worth mentioning, it’s so bad. It’s so bad, I had to pop in a couple other discs just to make sure my rear speakers weren’t on the fritz. Basically, the rear speakers just 100% mimic the front of the soundstage (dialogue, effects, music), but filtered through a chunk of tin. Everything you hear up front is duplicated in the rear, with a pitch set to trigger tinnitus. It all has this slightly elevated, ringing quality that reminds me of nails on a chalkboard.

Just stick to the stereo mix.

Hiding Out has a wonderful offering of features that help give added context to the film’s development. Jon Cryer and Annabeth Gish both have long interviews on the second disc that go over their involvement and how the screenplay changed shape from its inception as a film called Adult Education to the final product. Both discs also pack three audio commentaries.

4K UHD Disc

• Audio Commentary – Director Bob Giraldi, moderated by Heather Buckley

• Audio Commentary – Film historians Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson

• Audio Commentary – Film historian Jarret Gahan

Blu-ray Disc

• Audio Commentary – Director Bob Giraldi, moderated by Heather Buckley

• Audio Commentary – Film historians Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson

• Audio Commentary – Film historian Jarret Gahan

• Adult Education (HD 35:19) – Interview with Jon Cryer

• Teen Spirit (HD 18:24) – Interview with Annabeth Gish

• Trailers

I love teen movies of this era, because I grew up with them, and there’s a comfort to them and the predictability of their plots. So, it’s a shame that I don’t connect with Hiding Out as much as its contemporaries, despite having a charming, dedicated cast and a whole lot of talent behind the camera. Not every movie ages well, but if you go in knowing it was a different time, it’s easy to overlook its more dubious plot-related aspects. Hiding Out isn’t quite fun enough to overlook the grossness of how inappropriate the romance at its center is. Movies like this are light, easy fun, and it’s hard to get swept up in that when the whole thing is sad fantasy, dreaming of young girls and teenage popularity as a man nearing his 30s. The video transfer looks amazing, with some great supplements on each disc. I can’t quite recommend this one, but it’s Worth a Look.