“I have come to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubble gum.” They Live stars our boy Roddy Piper as John Nada, a drifter who just happens to stumble on an extradimensional alien plot to take over the world. He does this with a snazzy pair of sunglasses that help him see subliminal messages and the aliens as they really are. Along the way he teams up with Frank (Keith David). After one of the best street brawls to date, he “convinces” Frank to try on a pair of sunglasses. The rest (as they say) is film history.
I don’t know why I like this film, maybe because I was a teenager when it first came out (1988). Hey what teenager wouldn’t like street fighting, evil alien conspiracies, and wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper all in one movie. In any case it brings back fond memories.
It was the only 2 hours I ever thought of Roddy Piper as anything less than a complete tool. I, too, was thinking of the movies, but forgot the name. Thanks for the memory jog.
The other day I got to the a movie early, and so as I was watching the pre-show advertisements (I was there even before the previews) I started noticing how stupid and pushy they all were - even worse than normal commercials, which are pretty bad in the first place.
And that made me think of THEY LIVE. So I started classifying the commercials according to the subliminal message they were sending. Was it:
CONSUME!
or
OBEY!
or
NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT.
or perhaps even:
THIS (MONEY) IS YOUR GOD!!
The ads for candy and soda were obviously CONSUME!
I was kinda torn on the car ads were they CONSUME our shitty products, or were they OBEY the lifestyle standards we arbitrarily dictate for you? Well, perhaps some of both…
The ads for jewlery and fashionable clothing I put firmly in the NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT category, since they were obviously about conforming to social pressures. Particularly if you know anything about the DeBeers diamond cartel and their “business practices”, it becomes glaringly obvious they don’t want you thinking.
I couldn’t figure out what to think about the ad for carpet cleaning services. I wasn’t convinced that carpets were MY GOD.
-Ben
I actually watched that again not too long ago. I love that film! Heck, I just love John Carpenter’s movies (even Ghosts of Mars and Vampires…especially Vampires).
That fight scene is the most brutal, realistic, and awesome fight scene. And I love the ending, it was the first American movie I’d scene like that Where the good guys get plugged in the end.
John Carpenter’s great at making realistic main characters that you typically would avoid in real life, but just can’t help but cheer in the movies.
If you loved Pipper in this, you should check him out in Hell Comes to Frogtown…now THAT’S a real gem.
Huh…My husband just TiVoed that yesterday and I assumed it was along the lines of his usual crap. I really appreciate the hilariousness of Roadhouse and TimeCop though (especially the part about carbon dating gold, heh) so I might just give it a whirl.
Mrs. Skeezix and I spent the day out and about, yesterday. On the way home, we spotted a “new” Chick-Fila (or whatever the proper name o’ that place is) billboard.* At least, it’s one we’d never seen before.
Eat Chikken. Sleep. Eat More Chikken.
I have had They Live on the brain ever since. Weird.
*[sub]For the unfamiliar, it’s a chicken-only fast food joint, no burgers. All of their billboard advertising consists of a plain white bilboard, with two or three plastic cows hand painting whatever the message is, in black paint. They’re amusing little “eat chicken and not cows” messages.[/sub]
On more than one occasion I have walked into an empty room, said “I have come to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I’m all out of ass to kick”, then pop a piece of gum in my mouth.
I have issues…but enough about me.
Great movie; I love the fight between Piper and David. I’m surprised David hasn’t gotten more big roles in films. I thought he was great in Men at Work and always enjoyed the numerous cartoon characters he voiced, especially Goliath in Gargoyles.
I’m not sure why I liked that movie so much. Maybe because it wasn’t overdone like so many sci fi movies. They didn’t bother with overblown special effects showing where the aliens came from or what their spaceships looked like. And they resisted the temptation of giving any kind of long-winded explanation about the subliminal messages; they were just kind of there in the background. In fact, IIRC, they also resisted putting in any kind of cheesy love interest. (Maybe there was and I’ve forgotten; but at any rate it wasn’t overdone.) In a lot of ways the movie was understated. They show it on TV a lot, and I always find myself watching the whole thing every time it’s on.
Carpernter’s usually good for that atypical scripting approach. A fair bit o’ the time, his lead characters either don’t make it to the very end of the movie, or if they do, they find themselves in an untenable situation (at best.)
This has become a lot more widespread in recent years, but he was always the best at it, IMO.
His villains don’t always have a detailed backstory, and yet you just don’t care; they’re so damned engaging. His protagonists are often not the kind of folks you’d want to hang out with at the local beer joint, but while you’re watching the flick, you love them.
Seems that his weaker flicks (most of his recent stuff, sadly) try to break this mold, and suffer for it.
Always a B-movie favorite of mine, but a also the digs at Reagan era consumerism, economics, and the yuppie mentality.
It also used to run late at night on Huntsville, AL TV station WZDX on a constant basis. The station’s channel number on the UHF dial: 54. I used to hear it was a bad place to work compared to other area TV stations, and always wondered if this was some kind of inside joke by the staff to run the movie so much because they disliked working there.
They Live was on AMC this past weekend & I watched it for I think the first time.
Intriguing premise - tho IMHO the execution left a lot to be desired. The satire was a bit heavy-handed for my taste.
The fight scene where Nada is trying to get Frank to try on the sunglasses was kinda dumb (from Frank’s perspective) in the first place and lasted WAAAAY too long in the second place.
Roddy was either too paranoid and not paranoid enough (occasionally at the same time) for most of the movie. And there was something really weird going on with Holly’s eyes.
I did like the fact that they didn’t go into a hi-tech explanation for how the aliens were hiding or how the sunglasses/contacts worked. The alien masks were cool-looking, but cheesy - the mouth movement was pretty poorly done.
I also liked how on the TV show near the end (after the transformer is blown up?) , the hosts were talking about violence on TV and that “directors like George Romero and John Carpenter should tone it down” or something like that.
Holly’s eyes are not a special effect. Meg Foster’s eyes really look like that. Check her out in any of her other films for confirmation. I especially recommend Masters Of The Universe, which is quite entertaining if you hanker for a hunk of big budget, well-executed cinematic cheese.
Two complaints and one compliment about the movie:
The soundtrack is the same five notes over … and over … and over again. dah DUH dah duh, DUH. John mufuggin’ Carpenter, you could have spared some creativity for that.
I imagined Roddy Piper saying “Well, John, I’d sure love to be in your movie, but we need a scene where I can use some gratuitous wrestling moves.” End result? The street brawl. It would have been redeemed had he done a suplex or an atomic drop …
And the compliment,
My DVD player still plays the audio when the disc is played at 2x. As a result, I get incomprehensible gibberish. Since the pace of the movie is so slow anyway, doing this to They Live results in a normal-paced movie with a “foreign language” soundtrack. I turn on the closed captioning and pretend I’m being cultured.
I really like this movie - it works, it’s entertaining, it’s clever and it doesn’t insult your intelligence by trying to be some big deal when it’s a small deal. Glad to see there are some other fans out there!
