They Live

Director: John Carpenter

1988 / 94min / 4K DCP

“Rowdy” Roddy Piper, a homeless construction worker who’s blown into Los Angeles looking for work, stumbles across a secret stash of sunglasses that, when worn, reveal to him a hidden world—one in which ghoulish extraterrestrial overlords walk the streets undetected in human guise, buffeting us, their clueless human serfs, into sheeplike consumer capitalist thralldom. One of the angriest pop movies of the 1980s—its premise, stated by Carpenter, that the me-first “‘Reagan Revolution’ is run by aliens from another galaxy”—and also one of the most relentlessly entertaining, with the interminable alleyway donnybrook between Piper and Keith David a particular high point.

Distributor: Universal

Part of Fugitive Days