They Live (1988)

Finally, Movie Club picks a good movie!  Just kidding, they're all good movies, Brent.  The dialogue is super dumb and relentlessly quotable while drowning you in a firehose of late-stage capitalist dystopia.  Much like Idiocracy, the only thing separating horror-comedy from documentary is time.  A lot of people do get killed by cops, specifically, so that might need a trigger warning.  Originally posted 23 May 2010.    John Carpenter really is the master of the B-grade horror movie. I feel like I shouldn't love his movies as much as I do, because they really are crap. But they're the best kind of crap! Come on, where else are you going to get Roddy Piper as the headlining star of a movie about alien yuppies destroying the world through consumerism?

Yeah, that guy is the star. Are you intrigued yet? You should be.

Rowdy Roddy is a drifter who stumbles upon the Truth: that aliens are among us...and they want us to buy stuff. He finds a pair of sunglasses that show through the aliens' subliminal messages. Somehow, they also allow him to hear the subtle announcements to "Obey, Consume" and "Don't Question Authority". Don't fight it, they're scientific glasses. Named after a doctor and everything. Sure, it was the doctor that invented LSD but that shouldn't bias you.

John Carpenter wrote (under the pseudonym "Frank Armitage"), directed, and composed the score for this movie. Fun fact: Frank Armitage was chosen as a nom de plume as an homage to H.P. Lovecraft. It's also the character name of Roddy's sidekick.

Because when you have an inside joke, the only thing to do is beat it to death. Otherwise people might mistake it for subtle and not see how clever you are.

This move is certainly not The Thing. Hell, it's not even Big Trouble in Little China but it's not bad. The effects of the aliens are very old-school Twilight Zone. I thought they were pretty groovy. It definitely belongs in "Cult Classic" territory, right next to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.