Every month, we at The HorrorBull Podcast will be releasing an extra free episode of the podcast to subscribers to our newsletter. The newest piece of free content this month is an audio commentary for one of my favorite movies of the 80s, They Live. It has all the things a movie about an alien invasion needs: a dystopian near-future (or current future), aliens posing as yuppies, super cool sunglasses, fight sequences, gunplay, and curse words.

It’s hard not to love this satire of Reagan’s super messed up trickle down economic policy from that most electro of decades. In fact, it has been deemed a “satirical science fiction movie” by the establishment at large, and I think I agree with that assessment of this John Carpenter sci-horror flick.

Jeremy and Krista from Lopez Radio joined me for this hilariously dark episode. We met under the auspices of talking about John Carpenter’s vicious (and lovably goofy) sci-fi flick but ended up talking about the 2016 election and Donald Trump for a good chunk of our hour-and-a-half discussion. It’s not that this cult classic wasn’t interesting; we just happened to think that it coincided a little TOO closely with the recent election, so yeah, we kind of threw our frustrations at the wall.

They Live is most notable for a few things: Rowdy Roddy Piper. The wrestler didn’t even know who John Carpenter was but signed up for They Live anyway. He’s one hell of a presence in the film, and his one-liners, including the oft-quoted ‘I’ve come to chew bubblegum and kick ass and I’m all out of bubble gum’, carry the movie from hellish sight to hellish sight.

And there’s the fight. Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David duke it out for, like, ten minutes at a certain point in the movie, a scene so famous it even got parodied by South Park. (Now you KNOW it’s famous!) If you are really into realistic brawling (with a little unrealistic grappling thrown in for drama’s sake), then you’ll dig that sequence, especially.