They Live

They Live (1988) begins with an unemployed construction worker finding a box of sunglasses, and putting them on shows him the world as it is. Through the glasses the billboards carry no images, only instructions: OBEY, CONSUME, MARRY AND REPRODUCE, NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT. On the money there is a line: this is your god. And some of the people are not people. Carpenter made it as a direct attack on eighties consumer culture and the economics of the period. He wrote the screenplay under the name Frank Armitage, taken from Lovecraft. Roddy Piper, the lead, was a wrestler rather than an actor. Carpenter picked him after watching a match. The most famous scene is a fight in an alley. One man is only trying to make another put the glasses on, and it runs five minutes and twenty seconds. In the script it was twenty seconds. Piper and Keith David worked on it for three weeks in Carpenter's back garden; some of the punches genuinely landed and only the face and groin shots were faked. Twice as much was shot as ended up in the film. Piper's most quoted line was not in the script; he improvised it out of his wrestling promos. It did moderate business, became a cult film later, and left a direct legacy in street art. It runs 93 minutes. Good for: science fiction, the eighties, and political allegory. Less good for: the effects are primitive, the acting is uneven, and the fight is deliberately long.