Join us Friday, the 31st at 9:00pm sharp for a screening of the John Carpenter classic, They Live. By this point in the 80’s, of the original four horror movie dynamos, Romero, Hooper, Craven and Carpenter, John Carpenter was the only one among the bunch still injecting his features with a strong dose of social examination. They Live runs wild with the idea that rich people are weird and satirizes then contemporary American culture by assuming that the only way to explain the upper class disconnect is that they’re aliens and the only way to explain the middle class lethargy was to assume that our minds are being controlled by the alien upper class. And if the darkly comedic nature of the movie dosn’t sell you on it, immediately, hey! It stars Rowdy Roddy Piper!
George Nada is a homeless day laborer in Los Angeles who takes up in one of the local hoovervilles while he looks for work. Through sheer bad luck he finds his way into a street level resistance group that uses a pair of specialized sunglasses that cut through the illusion of daily life to reveal a world saturated in mind control devices and subliminal messages on everything. To make matters worse, the glasses also reveal a big portion of the population to be a horrific race of aliens that are running everything.
They Live is a great movie with a surprisingly able performance by Piper. This is the movie that the South Park episode, Cripple Fight, reproduced the epic Jimmy/Timmy fight from and if you’ve ever heard someone say they’re here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, this is probably where they heard it.