They Live (1988) Starring Roddy Piper, Keith David & Meg Foster Directed by John Carpenter Written by Ray Nelson & John Carpenter

Let's say John Carpenter's career is a basketball game. Dark Star through Big Trouble in Little China would be the razzle dazzle of the Globetrotters. In little more than a decade he's responsible for Michael Myers, Jack Burton, Snake Plissken, establishing the slasher genre, letting us see what it would be like if Wilford Brimley killed a man using only a hand, creating the roster for Mortal Kombat, giving us some of the best synth scores of the 80's, creating one of the greatest endings ever in The Thing, as well as saving Kurt Russell from Disney movie obscurity. The legacy he'll leave behind is without question.

Prince of Darkness would be the crack in the surface - the first scratch on the new car that signals the beginning of the end. This is when your team is up at the half, but return from the locker room, unrecognizable. Blowing a 20-point lead, the game is now tied. With only seconds left, the ball is checked. From under the opponent's backboard, the player has enough time to pull his arm back, and launch with all his might. The buzzer sounds as the ball leaves his fingers. The teams freeze. The audience rises to it's feet. Every eye is on that ball, spinning through mid air. Time has stopped. The shooter can't help but think about being showered in champagne and the borderline illegal celebratory sex that'll follow. The fans are thinking about the cars that will be overturned and how the bruises from the rubber bullets will be worth it tomorrow morning. The douchebags in that teams’ shirt just know they're getting laid tonight.

And with the sound of the ball hitting the gymnasium wall, it's all over.

They Live is that resounding thud.

WWF Icon, Rowdy Roddy Piper stars as a nameless vagrant who arrives in Los Angles, alone and desperate. (His name is never given in the movie, but is listed as Nada in the credits.) Taking a job on a construction site, he befriends Frank Armitage (Played by David Keith, or Keith David - whichever one of them is black) who places him in the care of a community church/outreach service. Piper finds something unsettling about his new surroundings. In the wake of a late-night Branch Davidian-like raid on the compound, Piper realizes the organization was a shell - but for what? The only clue he can find is a box of sunglasses.

Taking refuge in a flop house, the Rowdy Boy realizes that these Blu-Blocker knock-offs go beyond fashion. With these shades comes a frightening revelation: Aliens are among us. Camouflaged in skin, these creatures have acclimated themselves into our society, and established a footing in both the public and private sectors. These aliens are only reveled in all their hideousness to those wearing these shades. More than that, one can see how magazines, billboards and television are nothing more than conduits by which these aliens are subliminally controlling our behavior. A billboard high above the city street carries a single word, "Conform." Magazines instruct, "Consume and reproduce." Money reads, "This is your God."

This is the stuff of great sci-fi pulp.

You have a conspiracy. Aliens. A not-so-veiled attack on consumerism. And an unimportant man whose sole duty is to warn the entire world. How does he go about doing it? By kicking ass and chewing bubble gum. This is a type of crazy-fucked-up good scenario that few (Harlan Ellison is one) have mastered. You have to try really hard to fuck this story up.

And Carpenter does just that. He wrote himself into a corner, and realizing he had no place to go, dug a hole - literally. After our heroes are pinned down, a portal emerges in the ground offering the Hero and Keith David/David Keith an easy escape as well as well as an opportunity to bring down the alien infrastructure. It's at this point the house of cards falls. Not to say that They Live is terrible. In fact, the feeling of paranoia it invokes marks it as one of the best entries in 80's sci-fi. The visuals of banners displaying a single, "Obey" are as eerie as movies get. The fractured flimsiness and collapse of the third act leads me to believe that it was constructed using gypsy labor. Not to belittle Roddy Piper, but it seems he was cast only as a grizzled alternative to an unavailable Kurt Russell, who I'm assuming turned down the role in order to make Overboard - a decision I strongly support. David Keith/Keith David is solid, as always.

The easiest way I can explain my disappointment is to say that it breaks a cardinal movie rule: Only one suspension of disbelief, per movie. This law allows for the audience to willfully forgive one lapse in science/reality/logic, but anything beyond that stretches the creative bounds and the audience will turn like the tide. (Repeatedly asking the audience to not give thought to what's going on is what killed The Departed. After the final shoot out in the elevator, it would take a rookie crime scene investigator all of five seconds to survey the scene before remarking, "Yeah, none of this is right.") With They Live, I'll buy that aliens live among us and are only visible through certain optic apparatus - but from here on out, I only ask that Carpenter keep it in the lanes. He doesn’t. Instead, the last twenty-minutes are the type of drivel that leaves you checking your watch, wondering only if this is going to be wrapped up anytime soon.

I'd be a sin to discuss They Live without giving the revered five-plus minute fight its due. In this scene, our Hero with no name confronts his only friend with the news of the invasion. Keith David/David Keith refuses to believe. The two engage in a grueling fight with Piper desperate to show his friend the truth. (According to IMDb, the actors only pulled punches to the face, the rest are real!) What's unique in this sequence is that Piper is forced to beat the shit out of his only friend as a means to show him the reality of the world they live in. By the sheer intensity in which Keith David/David Keith fights back, he's representing our struggle to remain apathetic to an increasingly unjust world. As a consumer culture, we shop and consume knowing that our purchases are the product of some environmental/social/emotional exploitation. I'm guilty of it. A majority of you reading this are, too. It's something that goes beyond willful ignorance. It's a downright refusal to observe the facts for the sake of convenience and comfort. This atrophy is what our Hero is fighting.

From the first time I saw They Live (when I was eight), I knew what the ending should have been: In the final moments, it should have been revealed that Piper's character is schizophrenic, and that we've been rooting for a crazy who has been killing people willy-nilly for the last 90-minutes. This may leave the giant plot hole of why Keith David/David Keith followed suit. I don't know. Maybe he was just really bored or impressionable.

Of the past 20-years, They Live and In the Mouth of Madness mark the last John Carpenter movies worth watching. Leaving us to wonder if it's better to burn out, than fade away.