Guest hosts Tyler Sonic & Lisa Macaroni
The greatest movie ever made starring a professional wrestler, and—yeah, we’ll say it—one of the best political movies of the 1980s, They Live is, like a handful of other Carpenter films, a masterpiece disguised as kitschy ’80s sci-fi. The late, lamented “Rowdy” Roddy Piper stars as a homeless construction worker who’s blown into Los Angeles looking for work, and stumbles across a secret stash of sunglasses that, when worn, reveal to him a hidden world—one in which ghoulish extraterrestrial overlords walk the streets undetected in human guise, buffeting us, their clueless human serfs, into sheeplike consumer capitalist thralldom with all-caps commands: CONSUME! OBEY!
Great lines abound. Favorites might include: “I came here to kick ass and chew bubble gum… and I’m all out of bubble gum” and “Either put on these glasses… or start eatin’ that trash can.”
The film’s premise, according to Carpenter, is discovering that the me-first, ’80s Reagan Revolution is run by aliens from another galaxy, bent on total domination. But one of the angriest pop movies of the 1980s is also one of the most relentlessly entertaining, with the interminable alleyway donnybrook between Piper and Keith David a particular high point.
Any similarities to the current political climate are either completely non-existent, totally coincidental, or utterly prescient, depending on your POV.
Tyler and Lisa moved to Vermont in 2024 from Central Michigan, where they produced and hosted the monthly screening series VHS Night at the Broadway. They also publish Horror Macaroni, a zine on horror, kitsch, and dead formats, whose fifth issue will be out this summer.