This is a pretty cool, quirky film. The time is a near future and obnoxious wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper plays drifter who comes to the big city to work. He meets up with this big black guy and they bulge their muscles together working (and living) at a construction site. The gap between the very rich and very poor is widening and weird things are going on at a church. Director Carpenter was apparently trying to make an analogy to some of the right-wing social and political trends going on in the real world (actually, I think he does that in most of his movies). Anyhow, Piper finds some sunglasses and when he looks through them, all the rich people look like toadfaced aliens. In fact, THEY ARE toadfaced aliens! All of the billboards and signs have hidden words painted on them, seeming into our subconscious, but revealed with the aid of the sunglasses.
The basic premise here is that the world has been taken over by these aliens who can look like humans and subliminally keep the world's people under control. They communicate with Dick Tracy 2-way wristwatches and have a secret base underground where they can transport back and forth to their home planet. Roddy gets to wrestle/fight the black guy for a r-e-a-l-l-y long fight (I read that John Carpenter just kind of let those guys go and left the camera rolling) and join an underground group who are fighting the aliens. He also gets a gun and kills a whole bunch of them.
Whenever I used to catch Rowdy Roddy Piper on Portland Wrestling, he was a total jerk - I hated him. Of course, I think that's all part of the act - you're supposed to hate him. In this movie, he was kind of cool. This film has a classic line that is at once really stupid and really hilarious. Roddy walks into a bank full of the rich aliens with a big gun and says, "I came to chew bubble gum and kick ass...and I'm all out of bubble gum."
There's a lot of cool effects with the glasses showing the world alternately as we see it and the world as the aliens have made it. What they need to do is have John and Roddy come back and do a sequel, where humanity and the aliens battle in a massive apocalyptic war with guns and zombies and lasers and spaceships and all that stuff. Hee hee hee! As I recall, They Live got a rather cold shoulder at the box office, so I don't know that a They Live II is likely in the near future. In this meantime, this movie's pretty neat. Oh yeah and another killer John Carpenter soundtrack. Check it out!
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