They Live (1988)

Rating: 4 out of 5.

They Live grumbles to life like a vacation house, into brash and austere morning, prim with institutional slick, gullible ides and crimson paradox, showing off the hairy shackles of moral omnipotence like its lurid caveat, holding asylum America in its arms. Heeding its synchronic courtesy—namely, when the television sermon aligns with the preacher’s mouthing in the yard—is tantamount to, nutshell, equivocating its plot line with its stimulus, to calling a dull throb by its inertia—so, in my view, it is preferable to assent. And not just its technology, but its jamming pottery ecology also obeys this challenge, this angry unfastened threat, in that both are imperceptibly deprecated and, as such, outlandish, boorish, inconceivable against the grain. It becomes impossible to alienate the film’s homeless traipse from its object worldview, as if these were assigned mutually like footprints and soles, and for this reason its ego psychology is missable and terroristic, like drunken battery or a sexual assault, proving a complete (or rigorous) lapse in cinematic judgment, a failed signal in and of itself, and thus setting a frightful scene for the rest of the movie in toto. Its aggressive cop-killer fantasy proves positively Antichristic in its overindulgence of the equivalent, for belief, of a false start, a premature gun, and is not well-remedied by the quotidian aspersion or roundabout of delusion, showing better altar in least impulse—that is, in elaborate alien schematic. Its porousness is otherworldly, too weak to be true, whereas its emotional surfeit is astonishingly craven and unsafe, and at times this interaction can become surprisingly vicious, at least for such dissolution, for such an Orphic retention.