They Live (1988): CONSUME, OBEY, CONSUME, OBEY, CONSUME, OBEY
The Every Movie Ever! Podcast by Ben Groves & Rob Macfarlane
Episode notes
Ben and Rob intercept the frequency in John Carpenter's They Live (1988), starring Roddy Piper as a man with nothing, Keith David as a man with just enough left to lose, and an entire ruling class of skull-faced aliens doing their most convincing work in business suits. What begins as the story of how a six-page pulp story from 1963, written by a man almost nobody has heard of, adapted into a comic nobody much read, ended up in the hands of a furious filmmaker who wanted to give the finger to a sitting president slowly develops into something considerably larger; a conversation about the collision of rage, resourcefulness, and sheer unlikely chemistry that produced one of the most politically precise films Hollywood has ever accidentally greenlit and whether a B-movie with a four-million-dollar budget and rubber alien masks is secretly o ...