Classic Movie Review: 'They Live' is John Carpenter at His Best

As a film critic one of my most reviled and despised opinions is that I don't care for John Carpenter’s 1978 horror movie Halloween. I find the film to be amateurish, if I may be frank, with an almost absurd level of over-praise for its filmmaking. Thankfully, my disdain for Halloween was not enough to sour me on the work of John Carpenter as a whole. I was lucky that I stuck with Carpenter as movies like The Fog, Escape from New York and the movie I am writing about today, 1988’s They Live, are genuinely brilliant movies, far more worthy of praise than Halloween.

They Live tells the story of a drifter (Rowdy Roddy Piper of wrestling fame) who travels to a futuristic Los Angeles (maybe? Or Pittsburgh? Not sure) where searches for works in a society where the divide between the haves and the have nots has grown to disheartening degrees. Eventually, our hero finds work on a construction site and a new friend in co-worker, Frank (Keith David) who helps him find shelter at a local homeless enclave.

There, our hero stumbles on to what he believes to be some sort of criminal operation inside a church. The organizer claims the church helps the homeless with food but our hero will discover that it is actually a den hiding a government resistance group that has learned a deep, dark secret: our government and indeed our daily lives, have fallen under control of aliens bent on turning human against human to make way for their invasion, enriching the few and enslaving the many.

Our hero finds these notions to be far fetched until he stumbles onto a pair of magic sunglasses. When he puts the sunglasses on, the world becomes a very different place. Advertising on billboards and magazine covers disappear to reveal subliminal messages such as ‘Obey,’ ‘Consume,’ and ‘Stay Asleep.’ More disturbingly though, the glasses allow our hero to see the aliens hiding in human form, their bug-eyed, meat and bone faces revealed by the sunglasses.

Deeply disturbed by what he’s seen, our hero tries to recruit his buddy frank so that they can find a way to warn the world about the alien invasion that is enslaving millions. But first, Frank and our hero have to have an epic, knock down, drag out, brawl to end all movie brawls. A fight so iconically brutal that for a time it superseded the film itself in the minds of those who remembered They Live. They Live became the movie with the fight and not the clever bit of classic sci-fi paranoia that it really is.

That fight scene is pretty epic. Rowdy Roddy Piper decided to add some of his WWF wrestling maneuvers into the battle for kicks but it is the punching and the length of this gritty battle that sticks with you. The fight lasts for endless minutes and the gut wrenching sound of each punch would make a Rocky fan wince. It’s brilliantly shot as well, the perspectives allowing you to feel almost a part of the melee yourself.

Beyond this fight however, John Carpenter demonstrates a mastery of genre in They Live. He clearly has studied the paranoia and propaganda of classic cinema and he mines a treasure trove of classic science fiction to inform his very modern and still rather trenchant flick. They Live has a message about wealth distribution that feels ripped from today’s headlines.

The paranoia about subliminal messages is perhaps a little dated but it works in the context of They Live and it makes for a terrific visual to go with the gory faces of the awful aliens. The crisp black and white photography is a lovely throwback to the paranoid sci-fi of the red scare 50s and Francisco X. Perez’s perfect makeup for the aliens really pops in both black and white and color, when we briefly see the aliens in color.

Perez is one of the unsung heroes of the makeup world. He would go on from They Live in 1988 to Avengers nearly 30 years. His work is as vital and memorable as ever, now as part of one of the biggest blockbuster franchises of all time. It began however, with They Live and his incredibly detailed and deeply unsettling aliens. Carpenter gets credit, of course, for making them creepy but he certainly could not have done it without Perez.

They Live has issues, such as, near the end of the movie, when we get what I have come to call ‘Deus Ex Homeless Guy,’ a character who exists solely because the plot needs him to conveniently bridge into the final act, but that little bit of cheesy cheat doesn’t bother me too much. I can’t get mad at They Live, it’s too much fun. When Roddy Piper announces to a room full of aliens that he ‘came here to kickass and chew bubblegum and I’m all out of bubblegum,’ I get giddy. It’s super-cheesy but deliciously fun.

That’s They Live in a nutshell. Super-cheesy and super-fun. It has touches that are genuinely relevant, even trenchant but the core of the film is classic genre filmmaking found in Carpenter’s exceptional plotting, terrific action, and the tremendous use of homage to classic sci-fi. The Live is a movie that, for 1988, was incredibly modern and yet carried a love and respect for the past. And it’s just a whole load of fun even 30 years later.