10 Most Spiteful Movie Easter Eggs Ever

Plenty of directors have taken blatant pot-shots at film critics for negative reviews they've given previously - most famously, Leonard Maltin getting mauled in Gremlins 2 after panning the original film - though one of the more hilariously subtle put-downs occurs in John Carpenter's They Live.

Carpenter's brilliantly unhinged sci-fi satire revolves around a drifter, Nada (Roddy Piper), who learns that the ruling class are in fact aliens with skeletal faces, who are transmitting a signal to keep the human race pacified and unaware of this fact.

In the film's climax when Nada destroys the signal and the aliens' true identities are revealed, a montage shows various aliens being outed for who they really are.

This includes two slightly familiar-looking aliens on TV talking about the "excessive" violence in the movies of Carpenter and George A. Romero, with a placard behind them that reads, "No independent thought."

It's easily missed, but these aliens are actually supposed to be film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, neither of whom had showed much love to Carpenter's more recent films at the time.

Even if you don't recognise Siskel's distinctive suit or Ebert's hair-glasses combo, Siskel's nasal voice as he talks about Carpenter and Romero is a dead giveaway.

It may be funny, but it's also clearly the work of a frustrated filmmaker keen to vent that the two most famous film critics on the planet won't stop trashing his output.