The Awesomeness of They Live and The Tedium of Southland Tales
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Last night I had this crazy dream: Aliens had taken over the planet– but they looked just like humans, and the only way to unveil their ghoulish faces was to put on a rad pair of huge ’80s sunglasses. Also, the aliens were in cahoots with the elite upper class, and they were controlling our brains with television waves and subliminal messages embedded in advertisements, and the only one who could stop them was blue collar drifter-slash-Canadian pro wrestler, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper! But actually, it wasn’t a dream– it was the 1988 film They Live by John Carpenter, and it was blowing my mind.
Wikipedia describes They Live as “part science fiction thriller and part black comedy” which is as good a description as any. It’s just fun and kooky and bizarre, with a lot of heavy-handed allegory about Reaganomics and capitalist excess.
Basically, the story revolves around a man of humble means and huge biceps (Roddy Piper) drifting from place to place in a fruitless job search. He ends up working under the table at a construction site in Los Angeles, where he meets Keith David, who plays a musclebound worker usually seen sporting a loosely-fitted purple tank top. Roddy moves in with Keith in a shanty town/hobo camp situated across from a mysterious church. The church turns out to be the base of operations for a group of extremists who intend to distribute cases and cases of the aforementioned magical sunglasses in order to snap everyone out of the hypnosis these sneaky aliens have quietly cast upon America through the power of mass media.
When our man Rowdy Roddy accidentally discovers the power of the sunglasses, he intuitively knows what he has to do. Before anyone’s even stepped in to tell him what’s going on, Roddy quickly progresses from shock and awe at the images he’s seeing through his shades to a callous shooting rampage, killing alien body snatchers without a second thought. After kidnapping some creepy thin-lipped lady– and subsequently being shoved through the window of her hillside home– Roddy brushes himself off and decides he has to convince his purple prince Keith David to slip on the shades and have a look at the unbelievable truth.
You wouldn’t think this would be such a hard task to accomplish, but actually it requires a spectacular six minute long alley fight between the two men, rolling around on the ground for what seems like forever, slamming each other’s crotches until their collective sperm count falls below the Zac Efron level. The rest of the movie unfolds in a mostly unsurprising series of events borrowed from the 1983 alien invasion miniseries, V.
This gem of a movie is full of unexplained plot nonsense, gratuitous catch phrases, superfluous action, bad acting, less-than-subtle metaphors and pretentious undertones. And it’s completely rad. Oh, and there are a bunch of silly moments of comic relief thrown in for good measure. When Roddy brings his thin-lipped hostage lady home, we see a glimpse of her hairy, shirtless gay neighbors, squinting apprehensively at the presence of Rowdy Roddy, and then turning their noses up with a huff at their distressed neighbor.
They Live is everything that Southland Tales tries to be and isn’t. Based on the frenetic, prententiously bonkers trailer, I had such high hopes for Richard Kelly’s follow-up to Donnie Darko. Much like They Live, Southland Tales is on the surface a retarded, campy, and excessive apocalyptic social commentary starring a former wrestler turned action star– but the difference is that while They Live is throughly entertaining on multiple levels and consistently fun, Southland Tales is just fucking boring. And embarrassing.
I regret dishing out $7.00 for a matinee screening of Kelly’s film, which has to be one of the biggest cinematic messes of all time– at least on such a grand scale. Full of superficially cryptic dialogue that starts to drill a hole in your brain around the thirty-minute mark, an endless barrage of extremely unappealing aesthetic choices, and rambling plot threads that could’ve been exciting in spite of their pointlessness– but instead become boring under the cockiness of Kelly’s delusions of grandeur– Southland Tales takes all the fun out of its shittiness. If you’re thinking of seeing Southland to witness the sheer absurdity of its existence, don’t bother. Save yourself two and a half hours of tedium and rent John Carpenter’s They Live instead. Trust me, you’ll be better off.
they live is such a sick movie, the fight scene was a time warp in pacing for sure. J Carpenter gets just the right level of tackiness sometimes. I also liked The Thing, does he have any other flicks worth checking out?
i havent seen that movie since i was ten!
oh but it was so cool.
mom thought it was a good way to combine action movies and instilling her/a “healthy” sense of paranoia about the world.
you should grow your hair out like that one bear guy leaning on the water thing
You’re right about They Live. Its been so long since I’ve watched it. The fight scene is epic and gruesome and was one of the few times I’ve ever had to look away from the screen during a movie. Also, I got a kick out of the Republican aliens.
I came across the movie on late night television and from the tip from an old website I used to browse religiously that had long, wikipedia-like articles and circular linking, except it was dedicated to pop culture oddities and cult religions. I searched google high and low and can’t find it. :\ That was a really fun website, too.
yeah. best fight scene ever. after that though… eh.
like: what’s up with the climatic destruction of the alien transmitter resembling shooting a big light bulb with an itty bitty pistol? that’s it?
also, i’m friends with Roddy on myspace.
What better way to comment on the confused mess of “Southland Tales” than to compare it to the efficient B-movie big-idea film “They Live.” Carpenter’s movie has all the humor and irony that “Southland” wishes it had and then some. It also makes some kind of coherent sense even though its premise isn’t entirely thought out. Great post. Cheers! “Put on the sunglasses!”
Greetings from the UK!
Well. You’re half right. “They Live” is a wonderful work of genius in every way. But…
It may be sacrilege to say it right now, but the bottom line is simply this: “Southland Tales” is nowhere near as bad as the panning it has received. It is, in fact, (whisper this) “really quite good”. Prediction: come back in ten (or twenty) years and see what people are saying about it then.
Remember, “Terminator” received less favourable reviews than “Night of the Comet” (which I also adore) in 1984. Let time provide some perspective…
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