On T List of Movie Reviews
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They Live (1988)
Rate:
7
Viewed:
9/12
9/12:
Wow...Rowdy Roddy Piper stars in They Live.
If you don't know who he is, obviously you aren't familiar with WWF. If you don't know what that is, forget it. Now, I
wonder if Roddy would've made a good second choice for the Snake Plissken role in
Escape from New York.
Anyway, I like the concepts as presented. In the philosophical sense, it's
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
meets The Thing minus the gore. I read somewhere that The Thing,
Prince of Darkness, and
In the Mouth of Madness comprise John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy, but really,
They Live should be part of it, too.
The reason for the loss of points in my rating is that some of the scenes, most notably the fight between Roddy's and Keith
David's characters, take away a lot of energy from the film. At one point, the former robs a bank while packing an arsenal of
guns but gets away with it? It'll never happen.
Consider the number of mutants in the world, killing a few of them isn't going to solve the problem. It should be
done through mass effort. Instead, John Carpenter solves the problem by taking out the link between the two worlds. However, is
it subject to only one region?
All in all, They Live is a good film that's saddled with logic flaws.