Review of They Live (1988) by Adam H — 01 May 2010

Nada, played by ?Rowdy? Roddy (an ex-wrestler who made his debut in the video favourite Hell Goes To Frogtown) is one of the new American hobos, a loser in the 80s boom who comes looking for work to a big city with only a backpack for company.

He stumbles over a revolutionary movement hiding out in a skid-row church and gets hold of a pair of sunglasses that enable him to see the world as it really is. Re-uses some of the basic cliches of science fiction movies and prefers to leap about all over the place rather than develop a coherent storyline, but it keeps on the move, and it has a bizarre, intriguing combination of political allegory and old fashioned paranoid horror.