Everybody loves John Carpenter's movies. From The Thing, Halloween, Prince of Darkness, Christine, Escape From New York, Village of the Damned, Starman.....every single one is a winner (okay maybe the exception of Ghost of Mars!). I was getting bored of making daily trips to the kitchen the other night (again) so I decided to have another go with Carpenter's 'They Live' movie from 1988. What's a guy gotta do during the lockdown period huh?
I can safely say that even though the movie has been branded as a 'leftie' movie, it stood the test of time and remained a staple for every geeks and nerds wanting something different out of an alien invasion movie. Is it really an alien invasion movie? More like alien assimilation if ya ask me.
So let's delve right into the movie....
The movie stars 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper, a legendary wrestler in his own right. I remember watching WWF (not the animal NGO) before it morphed into WWE back in the 80s and Roddy was one of the guys you just love to hate and hate to love. He was that good. I was told that back in the late 80s, Roddy Piper tried to do a 'Dwayne Johnson' at the time and ventured into the movie scene but his career never really took off but it ain't so bad having only starred in one cult classic movie.
Alongside Piper is Keith David, a star already made famous by his appearances in Platoon and Carpenter's The Thing.
So the movie tells the story of a drifter making his way into sub urban Los Angeles trying to survive in the harsh realities of upper class pressures. The hero, George Nada, whose name I barely hear throughout the movie seems like a goodie-two-shoe until he stumbled across a box of sunglasses which gave him the revelation that everything around us is not as it seems.
When Nada puts on a pair he realised that the world is full of subliminal messages and that people's lives were just a series of long and repetitive routines. These messages are everywhere on billboards, electronic message screens, shop signs etc.
What's more fascinating is the fact that the world is now ruled by skull-faced aliens (let's call 'em 'Skullies' for easy of reference) and they have assimilated well into the human world undetected by most humans. So whenever the protagonists put own the sunglasses they were able to see through the deceptions and later their sunglasses were upgraded to contact lens.
A huge plot twist at the very end revealed that a handful of humans did know about the Skullies' invasion/assimilation and they were all working hand-in-hand to create a new world where the Skullies rule planet Earth unbeknownst by almost every one except the human conspirators themselves.
The story ended with a victory for the humans when Nada destroyed the radar that shielded the humans' vision from viewing the real physical nature of the Skellies. I loved the end scene where humans everywhere got the shock of their lives when they realised that these Skullies have been living amongst them all this while. Victory for the human race followed, I assumed. This was something that was never shown in the movie despite it being mentioned in the original source material.
The Skullies used to scare me to heck when I watched the movie for the first time back in the late 80s courtesy of my neighbourhood video store rental video tape. I wasn't sure if the skull effects were just latex masks at the time but now I can safely assume that they were a combination of latex masks and (pre) CGI effects. Whatever they were, they worked!
Hey did anyone notice that 'PKE Meter'-like contraption the security dude use when they searched for the protagonists? I wonder if it's the same prop from the Ghostbusters movie? It has to be!
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Talking about the source material, now let me bring you back to the short story that inspired the movie. In 1963, a writer by the name of Ray Nelson wrote a short story titled 'Eight O'Clock in the Morning' and had shook the literary world with its plot uniqeness at the time. Some critics even said that Nelson's writing had the same impact as when that certain H.G. Wells gave the world his War of the World book.
I love Ray Nelson's writing style. His language is simple enough for the masses and he brilliantly used a limited amount of words (hence short story) to cleverly uncover the plot of his masterpiece.
I love short stories. I spent a considerably large chunk of my youth reading short stories written by sci-fi/supernatural short story maestros like Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov and (to some extent) Stephen King.
For those who does not have the will or time to read Nelson's 6-pager masterpiece, there's always the comic version, although it was re-named 'Nada', as in the name of the protagonist George Nada. Here are some pages of that comic for your viewing pleasure.
Upon reading Nelson's short story and subsequently the comic I noticed that there were few deviations from the source material:
1. In the movie, the aliens were skull-faced; in the comics they were depicted as some weird looking hodge-podge of a creature; where as in the source material they were described as 'lizards'.
2. George Nada didn't use any special sunglasses in the original short story or the comics but rather he was 'awakened' and never really proved to anyone of what he saw.
3. In the short story and comics, Nada has to convey a message to snap everyone out of their trance and revealed how the aliens really looked like but in the movie he had to destroy the radar dish to stop the trance.
4. The aliens were known as the 'Fascinators' in the short story and comic but they had no name in the movie. Well I call them Skullies!
5. George Nada looked like a Terminator sent back in time to kill John Connor in the movie but he looked like a comic Constantine in the comic (and presumably the short story too).
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Ok, as an action figure enthusiast I was also happy to see that there were a couple of products being made to commemorate the movie. I still haven't gotten around to grab them for my collection but my latest viewing of the movie may just swing that indecisiveness to my favour.
