THEY LIVE—“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”  Thus spake the late, great Roddy Piper, legendary WWF badass and Everyman hero of John Carpenter’s wake up & fight back sci-fi salvo for 1988. As usual Carpenter directed his script (pseudonym credited Frank Armitage), which he based on Ray Nelson’s 1963 short story “Eight O’Clock In The Morning”, and a comic Nelson later spun off it called “Nada”.

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

The Future. Unemployed drifter ‘Nada’ (Piper, 33) has wound up in Los Angeles and managed to snag grunt work job on a construction site. Fellow working stiff ‘Frank Armitage’ (Keith David, 31) tips Nada on basic digs at a shantytown next to a church. Some mysterious activity around the church, coupled with repeat jamming of TV broadcasts by unidentified people raising cryptic social alarm, is followed by a brutal police sweep that destroys the settlement and raids the church. Nada avoids the melee but has found something astonishing that reveals something horrible: a special type of sunglasses that when worn show that many members of the population are actually a type of hideous alien, posing as humans with the intent to enslave the population, loot and dominate the planet, with the changing atmosphere turning into one more hospitable for their specie. Nada tries to alert ‘Holly’ (Meg Foster) who works at a TV station, and convinces skeptical Frank to ‘see the light’, and join him in taking up arms against the demonic invaders. Patience and bubblegum supply exhausted, Nada’s smiting of butt-ugly buttocks commences with extreme prejudice.

Both tongue-in-cheek and pointed, the thrust is that runaway greed (‘calling Capitalism on lines 1 thru 1000’) is so pervasive and destructive, so inhumane it may as well be from another, less welcoming place in the universe, a Fascist galaxy. An epic-scope premise, but done effectively enough on a $3,000,000 budget to put it across with limited but okay special effects, neat art direction, cool creepy makeup and plenty of fast, comic-book’y action. Piper’s experience from role-playing as a wrestler fits readily into toned-down screen acting, confident without going too broad to nix the mood or flub the gag. Brought back from his great slice of intensity in Carpenter’s The Thing, David once again wins audience allegiance as one of the best character actors of the modern age. Meg Foster adds a level of unease with those piercing eyes, so out-of-the-norm you wonder if maybe she comes from somewhere more distant than Pennsylvania.

Carpenter stages an action highlight between Piper and David, a crunching five-and-a half-minute alley brawl that results when Nada ‘convinces’ Frank to put on those glasses and see the truth behind the dream scheme. Total guy-movie fight fun, modeled on the classic bout in The Quiet Man. That no one could walk away from it alive is beside the point.

Critics (speaking of aliens) missed the gist when it came out: they’ve come around. It did well enough (with those in the masses who sport special glasses) to quash its $3,000,000 outlay with a $13,000,000 gross, ranking 74th in ’88.

“The Golden Rule…He who has the gold, makes the rules.”

Carpenter shared scoring the music with Alan Howarth. With George Buck Flower, Raymond St. Jacques, Peter Jason and Norman Alden. 94 minutes.

* Carpenter: ” “The picture’s premise is that the ‘Reagan Revolution’ is run by aliens from another galaxy. Free enterprisers from outer space have taken over the world, and are exploiting Earth as if it’s a third world planet. As soon as they exhaust all our resources, they’ll move on to another world…I began watching TV again. I quickly realized that everything we see is designed to sell us something…. It’s all about wanting us to buy something. The only thing they want to do is take our money.”

No kidding—speaking of projects and certain years, how this for prescient dialogue: “Our projections show that by the year 2025, not only America but the entire planet will be under the protection and dominion of this power alliance. The gains have been substantial, both for ourselves and for you, the human power elite!”  1988 seems like 1963 in comparison to where we are now, on the cusp of 2026 and hellbound for a bug-eyed finale. Congratulations all around!