'80s Roulette: THEY LIVE

A Carpenter classic feels like a bitter pill these days

I have (almost) every single movie released in theaters in the ‘80s in the United States on a hard drive and once a week, I’m going to hit shuffle and review whatever film comes up first.

Welcome to ‘80s Roulette!

NOVEMBER 23, 1988

They Live
Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, George ‘Buck’ Flower, Peter Jason, Raymond St. Jacques, Jason Robards III, John Lawrence, Susan Barnes, Sy Richardson, Wendy Brainard, Lucille Meredith, Susan Blanchard, Norman Alden, Dana Bratton, John F. Goff, Norman D. Wilson, Thelma Lee, Stratton Leopold, Rezza Shan, Norman Howell, Larry Franco, Tom Searle, Robert Grasmere, Vince Inneo, Bob Hudson, Jon Paul Jones, Dennis Cosmo Michael, Nancy Gee, Claudia Stanlee, Christine Anne Baur, Eileen Wesson, Gregory J. Barnett, Jimmy Nickerson, Kerry Rossall, Cibby Danyla, Jeff Imada, Michelle Costello
cinematography by Gary B. Kibbe
music by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth
screenplay by Frank Armitage
based on the short story ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson
produced by Larry Franco
directed by John Carpenter
Rated R
1 hr 34 mins

A drifter learns that the world is run by aliens that can only be seen with special equipment, and he joins the revolution to stop them.

I have come here today to chew bubblegum and review They Live, and I am all out of bubblegum.

It did not surprise me when Bong Joon-Ho recently hosted a screening of John Carpenter’s The Thing at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Museum. There is often a not-even-remotely subtextual satiric edge to Carpenter’s work, and perhaps the purest expression of that was in his 1988 film They Live. It feels like it is spiritually related to Snowpiercer and Parasite and The Host, movies that use genre to make strong social points in outrageous ways. It is not a horror film, and even in a career as varied and inventive as Carpenter’s, They Live feels singular, like nothing else he ever made.