They Live

After the death of professional wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper last month, I heard a lot about a 1988 film called They Live, in which he had a starring role. The line, "I'm here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubble gum," was bandied about on the Internet. I'm a naif when it comes to cult horror films, but I kind of knew this one was a big deal, because one of my favorite novelists, Jonathan Lethem, wrote a whole book about it.

So I finally saw it, and They Live, directed by horror maestro John Carpenter, is cheesy fun, as well as being eerily accurate about the world. I mean, I don't know if aliens are actually manipulating our lives, but it feels like it.

Piper plays an unnamed character who drifts into L.A. looking for a job. He finds one at a construction site, and is invited by a fellow worker, Keith David, to join him at a kind of homeless shelter/shantytown. They have a TV set up there, and someone hacks into the signal, telling everyone that they don't know the truth, and they are owned by other beings. This is also what is being preached by a blind minister, and Piper, curious, figures out that this group is set up in a church.

They get raided, but not before Piper walks off with a box that turns out to contain a bunch of sunglasses. Piper tries them on and is able to see reality as it is--signs have subliminal messages like "Obey," "Consume," "Marry and Reproduce." More troublesome--some people, who look normal when the glasses are off, are revealed to be scary looking monsters with skeletal faces.

Piper spends the next portion of the film attempting to convince others, including a woman he kidnaps (Meg Foster), who ends knocking him through a window and down a mountain, and David, with whom he has a long and absolutely entertaining fist fight. David finally puts on the glasses, they join the resistance, and try to find the signal that blocks everyone from understanding the truth.

They Live has a great script but has such a limited budget that it can't help but engender some laughs, such as when little flying saucers appear. Also, it would seem to me that the aliens would have more security on their one and only TV signal. Do they have them in other cities? This is unclear.

But there are a lot of great lines and moments. A fellow shelter resident, who has sold out to the aliens for riches, tells Piper and David, "We all sell out every day, might as well be on the winning team!" Or when the resistance leader tells Piper that the aliens just consider Earth their version of a third world, to be developed and abandoned.

Given the zeitgeist at the moment, and given that They Live has good ideas but a schlocky look, it is a film that is ripe for a remake, something I don't say about too many films.