10 More Obscure Films You Must See
7. They Live (dir. John Carpenter, 1988) 
You know that your movie has made an impact on pop culture when South Park devote nearly half an episode to recreating its most famous scene. The famous Cripple Fight, where Jimmy and Timmy go head to head, is in fact a shot-by-shot parody of the fight scene from John Carpenters They Live, a hugely underrated sci-fi action-thriller with the best film performance of any wrestler. They Live stars Rowdy Roddy Piper as John Nada, a drifter who takes a job as a construction worker in late-1980s LA. After befriending several people in a shantytown near a suburban church, he finds a box of discarded sunglasses in a rubbish pile down a dark alley. Putting on the sunglasses reveals the horrifying truth: that there are aliens living amongst us, hiding in plain sight through manipulating our brain waves, and enslaving our planet through endless subliminal messages that promote consumerism. Based loosely on the Ray Nelson short story 8 Oclock in the Morning, They Live takes the alien invasion premise of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, mixes it with some clever insights on American politics and mass media, and then injects it with Robocop levels of on-screen violence. It tips its hat to H. P. Lovecraft and The Twilight Zone in its exploration of an unseen world in our midst, while its analysis and satire of consumerist culture still feels fresh today. If nothing else, it contains one of the coolest lines in 1980s cinema, delivered by Piper as he prepares to gun down some aliens: I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass. And Im all out of bubble gum. Three Men on a Blog review The Movie Hour podcast: #4