Director John Carpenter
Starring Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster
Rated M
Score 5/6

A drifter discovers a pair of sunglasses that allow him to wake up to the fact that aliens have taken over the Earth.

For those of you who might be interested They Live was based on the 1963 short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson. I’ve been wanting to watch They Live for awhile and only just recently found a copy of it while on a DVD buying expedition.

If you know nothing else about They Live you have probably heard the line “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” Personally, the first time I came across that line was through the first-person shooter from the 90’s Duke Nukem 3D.

Although I am familiar with John Carpenter’s work, I don’t think I have reviewed much of it for The Movie Boards. Considering the direction, the movie went I thought that the beginning had this unassuming almost wholesome feel to it.
I got the impression that They Live is not the type of movie that is going to date horribly. Sure, there will always be better filmmaking techniques. But its message about materialism and the evils of mass media is something that everybody is going to be aware of. I know a lot of people are going to make fun of me for this, but I could not help but think of Uwe Boll’s Rampage movies and his 2013 movie Assault on Wall Street. Though given when they were made, I would regard them to be a tad more violent and extreme then They Live because they are a response to the GFC.
I loved the first scene when Nada (Roddy Piper’s character) first uses the glasses and heads into the supermarket and the use of colour and black & white to denote the differences between the two realities was an interesting move by the filmmakers. It should also be noted that 30 years its initial release the aliens in They Live don’t look as if they would be more at home in an episode of Doctor Who from the 60’s.
The brawl between Nada and Frank in the alley way (Roddy Piper and Keith David’s characters) is amazing. Part of me kept expecting more characters to become involved but they never did. In any other action movie, you would expect a fight that was crisp and fast paced. Instead a different school of thought was used for this scene, as Nada and Frank where dirty and brutal as they kicked each other’s asses.