Couldn’t even stay away from Alamo for 24 hours. I was back the next day for They Live, which has been on my watch list for a very long time. I’m here to watch movies and chew bubble gum, and I’m all out of bubble gum.
One of the best parts of Alamo is the preshow, a collection of random video clips to set the mood for the film to come. They’re not necessarily so good that you need to be there 30 minutes early, but it’s reason enough to add that extra buffer time to your arrival. They Live had a very fun one that had me guessing at the connections. A bunch of wrestling related stuff (animated cats wrestling, wrestlers singing “Land of 1000 Dances”, etc) because of lead actor “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. A trailer for Escape From New York because John Carpenter. A video of cats chilling in sunglasses bc the sunnies in the movie. Cute. Gave me enough time to order my fried pickles, which I finished before the trailers were even over, so I followed it up with a giant cookie milkshake that I immediately regretted.
Oh bonus points for the “Don’t Talk, Don’t Text” PSA. I love that they’ve got so many of these that they can also be tailored to the film. This one was curtesy of the man himself, John Carpenter. The finishing touch was the “OBEY” messages flashing on the screen, which I had done just enough homework on They Live to get the reference.
The film starts out kinda like Rambo. Big dude, down on his luck, wanders into town looking for work. We take a good chunk of time meeting this character and getting to know his situation. He’s drawn to a church across the street that’s holding some type of secret meetings. Eventually, he gets a hold of some sunglasses that he got from the church after it was raided by cops. Wearing the sunnies allows him to see the truth about the world: it’s crawling with aliens and they’ve planted subliminal messages to encourage obedience and submission all over the landscape.
So if the first act was intro, the second act was discovery, the third act was of course revolution. I was all about the second. I wanted to live more in that world and learn about who the aliens were and what their plans are and how society continued to go around. While I normally go there with action films, this was one where I felt my Daddy watching with me. He must have caught this on tv at some time because he really did love his weird little green men. We would have had so much fun with this.
No score because it’s an old film, but I’m thrilled to finally cross it off the list. ‘Twas a fun time.