“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I’m all out of bubblegum.”

As relevant today as it was upon its release in 1988, director John Carpenter‘s highly subversive (not to mention under-rated) 80s classic THEY LIVE – starring one of that decade’s most beloved WWF wrestling stars, the late “Rowdy” Roddy Piper (a proud Canadian!) – is one of our most frequently requested retro titles. This campy, dystopian work of sci-fi horror has Piper playing Nada, a wandering, homeless drifter without meaning in his life. Things take a turn when he discovers a pair of sunglasses capable of showing the world – the way it truly is. As he walks the streets of LA, Nada notices that both the media and the government are comprised of subliminal messages meant to keep the population subdued, and that most of the social elite are skull-faced aliens bent on world domination. With this shocking discovery, Nada fights to free humanity from the mind-controlling aliens.

“A bizarre, intriguing combination of political allegory and old-fashioned paranoid horror.” (Empire Magazine)

“John Carpenter‘s THEY LIVE has cult favorite written all over it, and part of the reason is the way it regenerates the cheap, juicy, surprisingly potent sci-fi of the 1950s.” (Boston Globe)

Saturday, August 29 Final Screening!
Doors 10:00 pm | Movie 10:30 pm *Start time subject to change
Advance tickets $15 HERE | $15 at the door

*Groupons and passes OK. Please redeem at the door.
**Minors OK in the balcony! Must be 19+ w/ID for bar service and main floor seating.

PLEASE NOTE: All of the Rio Theatre’s screenings are operating at a sharply reduced capacity. We can’t guarantee availability of tickets at the door, so advance tickets for all screening events are strongly recommended. Our online box office can be found at www.riotheatretickets.ca. Online sales for every screening automatically end 1 hour before any given showtime.

THEY LIVE (John Carpenter, 1998 / 93 mins / 14A) | A homeless drifter discovers a reason for the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor: a conspiracy by non-human aliens who have infiltrated American society in the guise of wealthy yuppies. With the help of special sunglasses that reveal the aliens’ true faces and their subliminal messages (“marry and reproduce,” “submit to authority”), our hero tries to stop the invasion. This satire of Reaganomics and the “greed is good” era also has one of the funniest (and longest) fight scenes in American cinema.