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They Live: conformist aliens, fight scene, and the power of friendship


In the 1988 movie They Live, starring Rowdy Roddy Piper, there are aliens that live among us and they use an electric signal to keep us dormant. These aliens cannot be seen due to the signal, which gives the alien human features. It was directed by John Carpenter.

Forty-five minutes into the movie Rowdy Roddy Piper's character finds a stronghold of the resistance to the aliens in the back room of a church. In this room he finds a lab with chemicals, and many boxes of sunglasses. Rowdy Roddy Piper watches the church through binoculars for hours. Then, the church is raided by police that are controlled by the aliens. After everyone has left, Rowdy Roddy Piper goes to the backroom where he found the lab. He punches through the wall into a sectret storage area. He finds a box of sunglasses. He takes it. He hides the box in a garbage can and takes a pair for himself. He walks to the street. He looks through the glasses. He sees a black and white world of subliminal messages. He walks down the street wearing the sunglasses. He sees a few people, then he sees the first alien. It asks him, 'what are you looking at?' Rowdy Roddy Piper gets scared and eventually is persued by two cops that are actually aliens. The aliens use thier wrist-commuunicators to tell the base that someone can see them. Rowdy kills the police-aliens and takes all thier guns. He walks into a building while looking behind him to see if anyone is following him. When he turns around he sees that he has walked into a bank. Up to this point Rowdy Piper has not spoken much, but the glasses are 'like a drug'. He notices he is in a bank and stands there for a second holding a shotgun and a handgun. The people in the bank go crazy. He says, 'I've come here to do two things, chew bubblegum and kick some ass... Looks like I'm all out of bubblegum.'Rowdy sees a few aliens in the crowd. Rowdy Roddy Piper stands in the bank and shots five or six aliens. The people running and going crazy think he is shooting people. Rowdy gets chased around for a while by the aliens. Everyone he sees he tries to get to put the sunglasses on and see how it really is. No one will put them on. There is even a six minute fight scene where rowdy is trying to get the person to put on his sunglasses. There are a few wrestling moves in the fight scene. It is pretty awesome, there is one time where this guy gets kneed six or seventimes in the nuts.



In the end he convinces this guy that the aliens exist. Rowdy and this guy get to the alien headquaters with one of the wrist-comminicator-transporters. I'm not really sure how they got it. That guy gets killed and Rowdy Roddy Piper makes his way to the source of the alien signal. I am giving away the end, but this movie was made is 1988 so I don't feel bad. He shoots the source. The signal is broken. The aliens are exposed to everyone, and the plot is foiled. Rowdy Roddy Piper gets shot by a person in a helicopter while he destoys the source. This is the world that he leave behind, with the aliens exposed:

The grey person returns home to find the kitten has turned into a catperson.

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