So after we watched The Grapes of Wrath, my wife was like “Okay, this needs to be paired with They Live,” and so I threw the disc in the ol’ player, and… okay, yeah, I see where she’s coming from.

Because, yeah, this is also a movie about people in a shitty, unemployment-heavy world who are angry at their wealthy rulers… but it turns out that in this case, those wealthy rulers are mostly weird-looking space aliens. And one day, Rowdy Roddy Piper finds the sunglasses that expose their manipulation and lay bare the “real” world underlying the surface one.

Like a lot of John Carpenter things, this is kind of a weird movie, because on the one hand, there’s the big concept — we’re being controlled, being given invisible messages to obey, consume, live contently in the suburbs, while the overclass does their own thing on top of us — but on the other hand, there’s the specifics of the movie.

Those specifics include things like Rowdy Roddy kidnapping a woman, who then seems like she’s really strongly flirting with him (I genuinely thought she was supposed to have some kind of kidnap victim kink for a bit); it includes Roddy picking a vicious, very long, knock-down-drag-out fight with his best friend so that he can gain an ally in his efforts to fight the aliens; and it includes the actual deus-ex-machina ending, with several varieties of super-science all combining in a handwave. Oh, and some of the laziest shooting scenes to hit an action movie.

I’m genuinely surprised this movie hasn’t been remade yet. The concept is so compelling, and the execution so mid, that there has to be room to do it better, and yet somehow this is some of the only IP in Hollywood not to have been remade yet. (Maybe the problem is that Carpenter is still alive and doesn’t want anyone remaking his masterpieces?) In the absence of that remake, I guess this is recommended, but only barely.