Fans of offbeat sci-fi movies, people who like iconic 80s professional wrestlers and conspiracy theorists who believe that The Illuminati secretly control the world have at least one thing in common: They’re all gonna get a kick out of They Live. It may be John Carpenter’s nuttiest movie. High concept meets high camp in the streets of El Lay with wrestler-turned-actor Rowdy Roddy Piper as our guide. At first, he seems like a stand-in for Kurt Russell, but the character is such a lunkhead (and intentionally so) that Piper is perfect in his own way. We don’t care much about what happens to him, which is fine in a film where the hero is on a death mission. This is a film about underworlds. There’s the homeless underworld, camped out at an urban dirt lot. They spend so much time on the streets that they sometimes see things that most people don’t. Then there’s the underworld of hidden puppet-masters, quiet conquerors. Aliens with an agenda and the mind control technology to do it. Carpenter treats all of this with the exact amount of seriousness that it deserves, which isn’t much. Piper’s blue collar man of action gets the kind of great and gratuitous one-liners that Schwarzenegger always had in the 80s. Meanwhile, Carpenter’s own music score, with a main theme that’s kind of a hack badass strut, seems to have a tongue in its cheek. This film handles its social commentary in the same way that a punk rock band might. Carpenter simply spits it out, throws it out there, doesn’t think too hard on it. You can take it seriously or not. This film doesn’t care as long as you’re having a good time.