Re-Watch 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper's Epic Fight Scene in 'They Live'

Wrestling star Roderick George Toombs, whose stage name was “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and who died on Friday of natural causes in his Hollywood home, will be remembered for one of cinema’s most memorable — and lengthy — fight scenes.

It all happened in John Carpenter’s 1998 sci-fi film They Live. In it, Piper played a drifter who realizes — while looking through a pair of special sunglasses — that alien invaders are attempting to brainwash Earthlings. Desperately, the drifter tries to share his new knowledge but everyone thinks he’s crazy — including a guy he confronts in an alley, as seen in the above scene.

The epic fistfight lasts nearly six minutes — quite long by movie standards.

Years later, Piper, showing good humor about the decidedly campy sci-fi flick, which is now considered a cult classic, stating on Twitter that the movie was, indeed, a documentary. Clearly he was joking: