THEY LIVE (1988)

"They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery."

Los Angeles, California.  A homeless guy (who somehow still manages to consume enough protein and steroids to look like pro wrestler Roddy Piper) finds a pair of sunglasses that reveal that the entire world is actually full of subliminal messages instructing the mindless masses to Consume, Obey, Conform and stuff like that.  They also reveal that some people (mostly those in power) are actually funky-looking aliens with faces that look like they "fell in the cheese dip back in 1957."  Now a level-headed person, if placed in the same situation, would probably keep this to themselves and investigate the situation for awhile, but no...not this guy.  Careful contemplation is not his style.  Within a few minutes of his discovery, he's yelling "...formaldehyde-face!" at a woman in a store and then straight up murdering aliens in a bank with a shotgun.  Naturally, this puts him on the aliens most wanted list.

For an older sci-fi film, THEY LIVE is still entertaining.  It's definitely watchable...medium pace, okay special effects, mediocre acting, a few memorable quotes ("I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass.  And I'm all out of bubble gum." being the most famous), a ridiculously long fight scene between the two leads (that had me rolling with laughter as a kid), brief topless scene, cool Los Angeles locations...but revisiting the film nowadays, THEY LIVE hasn't aged well.  And not all of it is the fault of the film itself.  The story, which is just a thinly veiled attack on Reaganomics, now comes off as simplistic and honestly depressing.  A few other things are...(1) there's simply not enough to the story itself, it could have easily been trimmed down to fit into an anthology collection or television show.  Or even better, beefed up to fill the entire 94-minute runtime.  (2) the ending is too abrupt and not satisfying.  (3) Roddy Piper.  He does an alright job, but his role would have been better filled by Kurt Russell.  Then again, this is all just my worthless opinion.

That said, THEY LIVE might be a little too cheesy for its own good, but it's still a fun 1980's John Carpenter outing and totally worth checking out. At this point, I'd enjoy seeing a serious remake. Maybe even one where the glasses aren't real and the main character is just insane.

Question (that's not part of the review): The nods to GHOSTBUSTERS and THE MONOLITH MONSTERS are obvious, but is the Uneeda Biscuit box in the hotel room a nod to Uneeda Medical Supply in THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD?

Question 2: Is that old dude in the hotel lobby the same guy from Metallica's "Enter Sandman" video?  That video was filmed only three years later in Los Angeles.

BODY BAGS (1993)

Made by Showtime as a test run for a "Tales from the Crypt"-style horror anthology show, BODY BAGS has horror legend John Carpenter dressed up like a corpse in a morgue.  He greets the audience and tells some fucking horrible jokes.  It's pretty bad.  Cheesy jokes are forgivable though as long as the stories are dope.  They're not...

"The Gas Station" The best thing I can say about this one is the main actress, Alex Datcher, is a good actress.  Unfortunately, the script gives her nothing to work with.  There's barely even a story.  She reports in for her first night as an overnight attendant at a secluded gas station.  Random people show up...including a serial killer.  That has the potential to be scary, but nothing here is even remotely scary.

"Hair" Stacy Keach (who's performance is the highlight of the entire movie) plays a dude who is super sad about his thinning hair.  He tries various concoctions, but none of them work.  Eventually, he goes to a hair growth doctor he saw on TV and before you know it, he's hairier than Cousin Itt's ballsack. 

"Eye" Luke Skywalker is an up and coming baseball player on his way to the big leagues.  Unfortunately, he can't drive for shit and while looking for a B-52's cassette (of all things), he wrecks his whip and ends up with piece of glass in his right eyeball.  The hospital replaces his damaged eyeball with an eye from a serial killer.  You can guess what happens next.

Book-ending the stories and sprinkled between them are more bad jokes by John Carpenter about drinking formaldehyde and stuff like that.  It's pretty easy to see why this was never made into a TV show.

BODY BAGS is more watchable now than it was in 1993, because when I watched it back then, it was just lame and the stories all drug on forever...but nowadays, it's an interesting time capsule full of 90's as fuck fashions and hair, a truly impressive cast of genre legends, Barney the Dinosaur on the cover of TV Guide, vintage electronics and so on. With a runtime of 91 minutes, there should have been four stories instead of three. Also, bump up the terror and blood. Three scary stories and one campy one. Or a mixture like in CREEPSHOW.