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| Title: THEY LIVE Year: 1988 Rating: ****1/2 |
In the last genuinely classic John Carpenter movie, THEY LIVE stars antagonist wrestler Roddy Piper, who couldn't stop kicking and screaming in the ring... yet here's a kind of spaghetti western loner that keeps his cool and hardly speaks...
Until the scenes the science-fiction alien-invasion thriller is known for, during the game-changing yet still slow-burn second act: after Roddy Piper discovers a pair of important cheap sunglasses...
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Roddy Piper in THEY LIVE
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Creatively revealing the usual urban city is actual not only full of grotesque aliens hiding in earthly business suits, but, visualized through an eerie B&W, street signs and magazines reveal that we're all subliminally hypnotized into submission...
Which is Carpenter's take on the 1980's, when prosperity was deemed greed (Hollywood didn't like the president), and thankfully there's more one-liner fun than the kind of cautionary tale exposition that usually encroaches science-fiction vehicles, dating all the way back to the pulpy 1950's...
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| Roddy Piper in THEY LIVE |
And Roddy becomes more of his cocky wrestling persona as a one-man alien killing machine, spouting lines that "I'm here to kick a-- and chew bubblegum, and I'm all out of bubblegum" with shotgun in hand... shooting random people and/or policeman that only he sees are the aliens within human skin... but he really becomes the day-job fighter in one of Carpenter's best sequences ever, going beyond his usual deliberately limited Hitchock style stylized action...
Letting Piper and moody black THE THING tough guy Keith David, a working man extremely reluctant to learn the truth, a 12-minute daytime-alleyway fight that's both fantastically bombastic and strategically plot-moving...
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| Keith David and Roddy Piper in THEY LIVE |
After which, THEY LIVE has only to conclude, suspensefully yet economically (lower-budgeted without seeming like it): with corridor-trouncing gunfights leading to enigmatic ingenue Meg Foster's not-so-shocking revelation, and a darkly humorous very-very-ending providing the kind of 90-minute action-horror/dark-comedy hybrid Carpenter should have never let go of...
As the Master of Horror is usually more of the Science-Fiction Master since THE THING, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and THEY LIVE exceeds his career-making slasher HALLOWEEN, in spades.
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| Keith David and Roddy Piper in THEY LIVE |
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| Roddy Piper in THEY LIVE |
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| Roddy Piper in THEY LIVE |
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| The Aliens from John Carpenter's THEY LIVE |
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| Raymond St. Jacques in THEY LIVE |
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| John Lawrence in THEY LIVE |
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| George Buck Flower, Jason Robards III and Wendy Brainard in THEY LIVE |
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| Peter Jason in THEY LIVE |
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| Roddy Piper in THEY LIVE |
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| Meg Foster in THEY LIVE |
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| Roddy Piper in THEY LIVE |
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| Roddy Piper in THEY LIVE |
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| Susan Blanchard (from Prince of Darkness) in THEY LIVE |
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| Sy Richardson, Roddy Piper and Keith David in THEY LIVE |
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| Meg Foster in THEY LIVE |
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| Peter Jason in THEY LIVE |
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| Henry Kingi in THEY LIVE |
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