This movie is sooooo cheesy, but good and a little creepy. (All those skeleton people and the plot against humanity).
Plus, it contains one of the greatest lines in all of movie history:
“I’m here to chew bubble gum and kick some ass, and I’m all out of bubble gum!”
It does seem wierd that after making two totally classic movies in “The Thing” and “Escape from New York”, that John Carpenter
would follow them up with this cheese fest. The story is really cool, but the production values are really bad. And, uh, when Roddy Piper is your action hero, you know that big bucks were not spent. But I have a soft spot for this movie. I just love the end where
Rowdy Roddy zaps out the alien transmitter and the aliens are exposed!! It’s classic.
As I mentioned in another thread where They Live came up I love the fact that the Timmy/Jimmy fight in South Park closely followed the fight in They Live.
I haven’t watched the movie in years though. Maybe I should check it out again and see if it was that creamy mix of good badness that I remember.
I have one of the video store displays. It’s an oversized box with a carboard hand and glasses attached. The lenses of the glasses are lenticular, the image in them changes from human to alien when you move.
Darth already mentioned my favorite scene. The film is a mix of bad sf and serious social commentary.
Compare-
“I wanna be like Mike”
with
“No independent thought”
It’s been a few years since the last time I saw it. But, do they ever actually say that They are aliens?
I was watching the VH1 South Park show (all about the characters and history of the show) and I flipped to AMC and They Live was on.
Flipping between the two was great… especially when they showed the ‘cripple fight’ between Jimmy and Timmy and the scenes and dialogue they took directly from They Live.
Why does They Live ALWAYS seem to be on AMC? Is it really an American Movie Classic?
Hell yes it’s an American Movie Classic! It’s Yankee BadFilm at its WorstBest.
Actually, this movie was the followup to Prince of Darkness, which, in retrospect, makes They Live seem like Blade Runner. Both movies came out while I was in high school working at a movie theater–a period where I saw just about every movie in wide distribution. I loved Prince of Darkness, but I couldn’t get anyone to see They Live! with me, so I went alone. For the first half of the movie, I thought it was a masterpiece. I was much more Marxist than I am now, so the implicit politics were right up my alley. Then the fight scene happened and the wheels just fell off the wagon.
I still think this movie is a classic and I will watch it every time it comes on.
This is a movie that I hate and love at the same time. It’s painfully cheesy and that fight scene is absurd, but that also contributes to the charm. It gave me chills when I saw it in high school. It kind of reminds me of Dawn of the Dead (original) which seemed painfully cheesy and addictive at the same time.
Anybody else read the Stephen King story “The Ten O’Clock People”?
The first time I saw They Live, I thought the movie had blatantly ripped off the King story. Then I found the movie was based on the 1963 story by Ray Nelson, “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” the complete text of which being easily found on Google. (I’m afraid to link to it, not sure if it’s public domain or not.)
So Stephen King blatantly ripped off an earlier story. What a shock. I think his story was much better than the original, though, I’ll give him that.
Well, I think it’s a terrific movie until the fight scene, which is so incredibly lame, poorly staged, unfunny, overlong, and unexciting, that the rest of the movie never recovers from the Terminally Stupid. A shame, because the first half is genuinely inspired on-the-cheap filmmaking.
And I think “The Line” is impossibly overrated, primarily because it sounds like a “line”, instead of something Roddy’s character would actually say.
I don’t think They Live is a combination of great and cheesy stuff. I think it’s simply a great film. That’s why I include it among my 100 favorite films: