Warning: Video contains explicit language
Some movie fights are impressive for their choreography, some are notable for the emotional truths that they reveal about the characters involved … and then there’s They Live. Whatever the word for more epic than epic is, that’s the word that should be used for this scene. The film, a John Carpenter (The Thing, Halloween) science-fiction story of a world secretly run by aliens, starred WWF star “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. So it’s natural that there would be a major fight scene. But this one lasts so long (more than five minutes), that this viewer suspects Carpenter was either having way too much fun, or mocking the concept of the movie fight scene itself. When Piper tries to convince his comrade to put on sunglasses that reveal the true nature of their world (shades of The Matrix), his pal resists. Hence the fists and the flips and the kneeing in the groin that go on, and on, and on, then stop, then go on some more. The sequence was famously parodied in a South Park episode that saw two disabled kids smashing away at each other.
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