They Live
1/4
Starring: Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, George 'Buck' Flower, Peter Jason
Rated R for Some Sci-Fi Violence and Terror
Horror movies are supposed to frighten you. A good horror movie will get under your skin and crawl its way down your spine. "Paranormal Activity" is a good example. By having a strong sense of atmosphere and character identification, it was able to scare me so deeply that I was afraid to move. The reverse is also true. Bad horror movies, like "They Live," can be tedious, stupid and irritating. John Carpenter's dud is all three.
A nameless drifter (Piper) has arrived in a nameless city looking for work. He gets a job at a construction site but is living in a slum until he gets on his feet. While there, he spies something odd happening in a church. He goes to investigate and finds boxes of sunglasses that when worn show subliminal messages and people who are actually aliens bent on world domination.
The set up is so on target it's scary (no pun intended). All the wealthy business people are aliens who are squeezing humans out of a job (well, those who don't sell themselves for wealth). Gee, maybe Ken Lay and Richard Fuld (the ex-CEO of Lehman Brothers) were secretly aliens. Call Mulder and Scully!
Unfortunately, that's the best part of the movie. Everything else is the pits. Roddy Piper is boring, and his character is developed as a mass murderer (yes, I know they're aliens, but the way Carpenter handles it is kind of sickening). Keith David, reliable character actor that he is, does what he can, but in a movie where he and the lead get into a ten minute long fistfight (a lifeless one at that) over the simplest of things, there's not much that anyone could do. No one else bears mention.
I can't believe that this was made by John Carpenter, who made the classic "Halloween," which by the way, I will never see again (I found it to be incredibly disturbing). Carpenter knows what he's doing; he directed "The Thing" and "Village of the Damned," but here his heart isn't in it. If there's any genre that's the absolute worst when done badly, it's horror. The pacing is terrible, there's no atmosphere to speak of, and the score, credited to Carpenter and Alan Howarth, is a strange jazzy thing.
No doubt Carpenter would highlight the satirical elements, like selling out and how people will do anything for money. They are there, but they're not especially enlightening Trust me, skip this one.
Starring: Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, George 'Buck' Flower, Peter Jason
Rated R for Some Sci-Fi Violence and Terror
Horror movies are supposed to frighten you. A good horror movie will get under your skin and crawl its way down your spine. "Paranormal Activity" is a good example. By having a strong sense of atmosphere and character identification, it was able to scare me so deeply that I was afraid to move. The reverse is also true. Bad horror movies, like "They Live," can be tedious, stupid and irritating. John Carpenter's dud is all three.
A nameless drifter (Piper) has arrived in a nameless city looking for work. He gets a job at a construction site but is living in a slum until he gets on his feet. While there, he spies something odd happening in a church. He goes to investigate and finds boxes of sunglasses that when worn show subliminal messages and people who are actually aliens bent on world domination.
The set up is so on target it's scary (no pun intended). All the wealthy business people are aliens who are squeezing humans out of a job (well, those who don't sell themselves for wealth). Gee, maybe Ken Lay and Richard Fuld (the ex-CEO of Lehman Brothers) were secretly aliens. Call Mulder and Scully!
Unfortunately, that's the best part of the movie. Everything else is the pits. Roddy Piper is boring, and his character is developed as a mass murderer (yes, I know they're aliens, but the way Carpenter handles it is kind of sickening). Keith David, reliable character actor that he is, does what he can, but in a movie where he and the lead get into a ten minute long fistfight (a lifeless one at that) over the simplest of things, there's not much that anyone could do. No one else bears mention.
I can't believe that this was made by John Carpenter, who made the classic "Halloween," which by the way, I will never see again (I found it to be incredibly disturbing). Carpenter knows what he's doing; he directed "The Thing" and "Village of the Damned," but here his heart isn't in it. If there's any genre that's the absolute worst when done badly, it's horror. The pacing is terrible, there's no atmosphere to speak of, and the score, credited to Carpenter and Alan Howarth, is a strange jazzy thing.
No doubt Carpenter would highlight the satirical elements, like selling out and how people will do anything for money. They are there, but they're not especially enlightening Trust me, skip this one.
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