THEY LIVE (1988)...life through a lens.

 

DIRECTED AND WRITTEN by John Carpenter (based on the short story 'Eight o'clock in the morning" by Ray Nelson).

STARRING  - Roddy Piper as Nada,  Keith David as Frank Armitage,  Meg Foster as Holly Thompson,  George "Buck" Flower as Drifter/Collaborator.

PLOT  - Nada is a homeless drifter, he arrives in Los Angeles looking for a job. He soon finds work on a building site and is befriended by a co-worker, Frank. Frank is living in a nearby shanty town, populated by the homeless and the hungry, and gets Nada a place to stay within the ramshackle community. However, all is not what it seems. Nada notices members of the community watching a pirate television channel, which warns that "they" are here, and that "they" are controlling all that we see and hear via signals that keep humanity in a dream like state. These signals must be cut off at the source. This is the only way to free mankind from its state of enslavement.

Nada notices people from the broadcast hanging around near the shanty town and soon discovers that an underground cell is operating in a nearby church, dedicated to defeating the invisible enemy. That night, the church is raided by heavily armed police. The following day Nada retrieves a box from the wreckage. Opening it, he finds it contains seemingly ordinary sunglasses. Putting on the glasses however proves to be something of a revelation for Nada. The glasses allow Nada to see the world as it really is and what he sees horrifies him...

For the glasses reveal the subliminal messages that surround the human race, hidden in advertisements and newspapers - messages that tell humanity to 'CONSUME', 'REPRODUCE' and most chillingly of all to 'OBEY'. The glasses also reveal that there are many seemingly normal people that aren't actually human at all, instead they are skull faced alien beings, hiding in plain sight, controlling the human race.

Nada makes it his mission to expose the alien conspiracy, but who's going to believe a homeless, penniless, societal misfit, especially when the alien interlopers are giving the human race what they think they need ?

DIALOUGE  - Nada - " I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass...and I'm all outta bubblegum !"

PERFORMANCES  - Roddy Piper as Nada makes for a somewhat cheesy but still compelling main protagonist. Strutting across the screen with his mullet hairstyle and shades he looks every inch the 80's action hero. His performance has certainly not aged well but he still manages to make the character of Nada likeable. You get the impression that underneath his tough guy 80's swagger there resides a quieter and more broken down man. Somebody who has been slowly ground down by the system and yet retains an optimism that things can, and will, get better. The fact that Nada's niave outlook is broken by the revelation he receives by donning the glasses, makes his desperation in the second half of the film seem all the more effective, and it is in these scenes that Piper comes across the best. Piper wasn't technically an actor by trade. He was originally a wrestler going under the stage name of 'Rowdy Roddy Piper' (seeing as wrestling is basically a form of theatre as opposed to being an actual sport, you could argue that all wrestlers are, basically, acting anyway). Piper decided to try his hand at acting, to be fair he does a decent job despite how dated he now looks.

Keith David as Frank gives a decent performance too. Frank is even more ground down by the system than Nada is. Frank is a man who just wants to get on with his assigned role in life - he's a husband and father who just wants to work hard so that he can feed his family. At first he's resentful at Nada coming along and upsetting the applecart but soon comes round to his way of thinking when he too dons the sunglasses and sees the world as it truly is. David brings a sense of bottled up righteous rage to the role. Frank is a coiled spring just waiting to be released, a humble man who is about to have his mind blown.

Rounding out the main cast are Meg Foster and George "Buck" Flower. Foster plays Holly, a TV station worker who Nada takes hostage at one point. Nada deveops an affection for her only to ultimately be betrayed by her when she sells him and Frank out to the aliens. Foster plays the role with a sense of steely resolve, you never quite trust her, no matter how great Nada seems to think she is, and it turns out that you're right not to...

Flower plays a homeless drifter temporarily residing at the shanty town, at first he just appears to be a drunken old bum but he turns out to be an alien collaborator who has been bought with the promise of money and power to sell out his fellow man. Presumably it was this man who alerted the authorities to the presence of the resistance cell operating in the shanty town. He's not in the film much but it's a memorable performance that adds to the movie's sense of growing paranoia. In this world everyone - no matter how innocuous they may seem, can and most probably WILL betray you to thier alien paymasters. Everybody has thier price...

SFX  - 'They Live' is not an overly effects heavy film, despite it's fantastical subject matter. The visual effect of the 'real' world is achieved by filming those scenes in black and white with set design adding subtle differences like hidden spy cameras that were not visible before. Also, there are those glaring posters and billboards telling us to 'OBEY'...

The aliens themselves are a memorable design and have become quite iconic over the years since this film was made. Thier skull like faces and glowing silver eyes look very incongruous when they are paired with the hairstyles and clothing of the humans that they are impersonating but that's kind of the whole point.

SEX & VIOLENCE  - We are talking standard fare 80's action movie violence here, nothing particularly gory or bloody. It's mainly shootings and explosions - Rambo/A-Team type of stuff (except no one ever died in the A-Team but you get the general gist), people die but it's never lingered upon.

No discussion of violence in this film is complete without me mentioning THAT fight scene. It's probably the most famous scene in the entire movie and the one part that everyone who's seen the film remembers. It's the scene where Nada tries to persuade a disbelieving Frank to put the magic glasses on.  This, being an action oriented film, causes fisticuffs to ensue. The fight goes on forever. It literally takes up about five minutes of screentime and seems even longer than that. This is not because its boring, because its not...it's just the most elaborate punch up that has ever been commited to film. Roddy even gets to do some of his wrestling moves. It's hilarious and ridiculous in the right way. Watching this scene never fails to bring a smile to my face.

There's an amusing sex scene where a human woman is having sex with a seemingly normal man. The alien's mental signal is at that moment broken and the aliens are revealed to the shocked eyes of the world...put it this way, this is one lady who is definitely going to be more choosy about who she picks up at bars in future...

RATING - 'They Live' is both a fun action/sci-fi/horror hybrid and a clever satire on consumerist capitalism. You can either choose to dwell on the movie's wider themes or you can just buckle in and enjoy watching men with bad mullets kick some alien ass.

It's a fast paced joyride of a film with intelligence at its heart and soul. Effectively directed and disorientating in places. It's very well done. It's not Carpenter's best film but its certainly not his worst either. 

Rating - 4 and a half mullet sporting hardmen out of 5. Pop it in your DVD player and see the world through new eyes...