REVIEW: Invasion USA (1985)

Run Time: 107 Mins
Rated: R
What To Expect: Chuck Norris executing communists up side alleys

I’ve been watching a some liberal kitsch crap recently and deliberately avoiding even more, so I needed some manly movie to put things right again.  The best bet was to go back a bit to when movies where good, but not to a movie I’ve seen 100 times. I decided to pull out one that I havent watched in years to get me back into the mood for this website bullshit again.  Here’s a rule that always works; when in doubt, consult Chuck.

A refresher on this movie.  Chuck Norris plays an ex CIA agent (Matt Hunter).  He lives in a shack, in a swamp and eats barbecued frogs.  One day, communists descend on his shack and blow it to hell and, narrowly surviving, Hunter suits up and goes on a gun toting rampage.  What a premise, it’s like someone who reads this site wrote it.  But who are they and where did they come from?  The reds are mostly drawn from Cuba, marxist terrorists led by the Soviet Mikhail Rostov (Richard Lynch, in a role turned down by Steven Berkoff), bent on creating panic and havoc, an attempt to make the American union implode.

Why are there no more Chuck Norris’ in movies?  Why are we getting the likes of Robert Downey Jr. and Channing Tatum instead?  These are not real action men — if they don’t have mullets or they don’t do round house kicks then what fucking use are they to us?  And only alpha males of a certain time tried to and got away with wearing certain denim-on-denim clothing, if today’s actors tried to do that, they’d look like gay strippers or something.  Wait, didn’t Channing Tatum actually appear in a movie like that?

Anyway, one such alpha male is Norris.  “I’m gonna hit you with so many rights, you’re gonna beg for a left”, Norris tells the invading scum.  Fuck, that dialogue is gold, and delivered straight as a rod by a former fighting champion – does it get much manlier than this? I mean okay, the movie is slightly short on plot (there is lost footage, where the characters are more fleshed out), but it’s long on action and patriotic virtue, it’s also probably one of Norris’ most expensive looking movies (albeit, still a long throw from a Sylvester Stallone job) – Menahem Golan threw an additional $2 million dollars at the movie after being pleased with test footage.  Norris also did most of his own stunts and the blood squibs are nice and ‘3D’.

Golan pulled out a few stops, with a full M60 tank platoon on city streets

We also learned from Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story Of Cannon Films that real suburban houses were destroyed, blown up by Rostov with RPGs.  This was possible because the houses were due to be razed for an airport extension anyway.  So this was a nice budgetary feat, and they were nice houses!

Can you imagine what wine sniffing critics would make of this movie if it was released today?  I’m sure it would induce trauma and elicit howls of laughter, hell, maybe some would even denounce Norris as the antagonist and Rostov as the misunderstood immigrant… seriously!  If Golan were around today, he’d probably want to do something similar but with the likes of ISIS instead, although they’d probably cut him off at the knees and that wouldn’t get made either.  In fact speaking of contemporary themes, for example with Europe, I feel this movie is particularly relevant and poignant.  There are landing crafts, just like in this movie, followed by terror and hate. The only thing we’re missing is a real life Matt Hunter.

So then… Invasion USA has aged well.  I mean, running down communists in a pick up truck, how much more American can you get?