Here we go, a movie by John Carpenter starring Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David, along with Meg Foster. The movie is sill, but it’s all in good fun.
This movie came out in 1988, Piper’s hair is amazing. He is a drifter looking for work. He finds work on a construction site. David Keith also works there, in beige pants and a purple wife beater. Seriously, he looks so great in that. And wait, he now puts on a denim vest!!! KD brings Piper to this place where homeless people live and get free food and whatnot. The movie’s pace is….a little slow to say the least. Some guy on TV is trying to spread all kinds of rhetoric, and his TV signal gets cut in and out. Is he crazy? Are crazy people ever as crazy as they appear in these movies? Think Randy Quaid in Independence Day.
Well 30 minutes in, and I keep getting fucking distracted. So starting tomorrow, there is a new policy, my door is gonna be locked while I watch my god damn movies. Seriously, I should have another 5 movies done easily if it weren’t for fucking distractions. Piper found the infamous box of sunglasses. This allows him to see all the subliminal messages on billboards and magazines, so instead of saying Golf Digest, the cover reads OBEY, or the hot chick with a drink on a billboard, it says to MARRY AND REPRODUCE. Even money has a message. And then he discovers that not everybody looks themselves when the glasses are on. They look like weird skulls where you see the muscles of the skull with ominous eyes I guess. I don’t know, that description isn’t terribly accurate.
So Piper starts running his mouth at this lady saying how ugly she is, and she realizes he can see, so she speaks into her bracelet, and apparently all of these people have communicator bracelets. Piper now has guns as well. Fantastic.
“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I’m all out of bubblegum.” – Piper
Piper is just shooting these fools up. Uhmmm, how are you expecting to get away with this?
The fight scene between Piper and KD is one of the 10 best fight sequences in film history in my opinion. It’s long and grueling, punishing, slightly outlandish, comical, and hard-fought. All because KD didn’t want to put the sunglasses on.
Well, the whole plot just delves into a small renegade group trying to take these people out, and it kinda reminds me of The Running Man in that regard. It’s much more of a clusterfuck, way more.
In conclusion, this isn’t a good John Carpenter film in the traditional sense. He gave us The Thing, Halloween, Christine, Escape From NY, Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog, and of course Vampires. Then there’s The Live. It’s such a wacky movie, but it’s fun. It’s very unique, tongue in cheek half the time. So while the quality may not be top-notch, I defy you not to have a fun time laughing at the shenanigans. I have seen this quite a few times, and yeah, there are parts that are lame, but then it gets me laughing again. Oh, and within the last minute, we finally see a nice topless blonde. All in all, I give this a 6.2 because I can’t really go higher, despite wanting to. I would recommend this to people who need a silly 80’s laugh with Roddy Piper and Keith David.
Final Rating: 6.2
All the pictures used in this blog are for review purposes. They are the property of:
- Alive Films (presents)
- Larry Franco Productions
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