“I’m here to chew bubble gum and kick ass… and I’m all out of bubblegum.” We all know that line from John Carpenter’s They Live, which is arguably the director’s last good film.
It’s a sci-fi story we’ve seen many times, only here it’s evil Republicans instead of an analogy for the Red Scare, and Carpenter updated it well for modern times. Like many of the movies we love to cover on TG, as the cliché goes, it enjoys a healthy cult following today.
So much so that a special edition coming out on Blu-ray on November 6. As Cinema Blend tells us, this special ed is hitting the shelves via Scream Factory, an offshoot of the retro DVD company Shout Factory, and just in time for the election too. There’s no detailed word yet on what will be part of this special edition, but it’s sure to have the usual goodies like interviews, audio commentary, cool archival stuff, and more.
Cinema Blend also joked that it should have a piece of bubblegum in reference to Rowdy Roddy Piper’s classic line, but another potential item I’d recommend is complimentary shades, so you can tell who’s for real, and who’s an evil alien. Blend also tells us the first five hundred orders will have a special poster giveaway with the new BluRay / DVD cover art.
Again, They Live was quite possibly Carpenter’s last really good film, and I’m very curious to see how today’s audiences will react to it in today’s political and financial climate. (C’mon guys! Don’t’ wait for the remake! Put a few bucks into an oldie but a goodie!)
In the Carpenter biography Prince of Darkness, the director said, “It’s a movie speaking out against unrestrained capitalism. I got fed up with being told over and over again that it was so beneficial to be a consumer. We are buying things, accumulating things, throwing money away, but we aren’t making anything good anymore. It was just starting to outrage me. I was more reacting on an intellectual level than on an emotional level.”
