Invasion U.S.A.
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Movie Reviews of Invasion U.S.A.
Movie Review: A Cool Action Flick!
Summary: 4 Stars
I'm very impressed with the audio and picture quality for this movie. If you're looking for good old Chuck Norris with his smooth and slick style then you should get this title. The plot is kinda one way but if you're looking for mere entertainment, then get this title.Movie Review: IT WAS NICE
Summary: 4 Stars
This was a pretty good movie, it has alot of Chuck Norris Humor in it. If u looking for the movie when he just does MArtial Arts this aint the one it does very little, but alot of explosions and shooting. Pretty good thoMovie Review: Invasion USA
Summary: 4 Stars
Chuck Norris at the pinnacle of his action movie career. Not as much martial arts as I was used to, but still Chuck kicking butt on the bad guys and tons of automatic weapons fire and kick ass attitude.Movie Review: Chucko kills the baddies
Summary: 3 Stars
The 1980s were a tough time to live through. First, Cold War hysteria reached new heights when Ronald Reagan talked trash with the commies as wife Nancy consulted astrology charts in the White House. Second, those crazy cranks in Cuba and the Soviet Union attempted to establish footholds in Grenada and El Salvador while running the show in Nicaragua. Third, the Medellin and Cali cartels shipped a few million boatloads of cocaine into the United States. Fourth, Islamic terrorists made headlines when they hijacked an ocean liner, several airplanes, and set off a car bomb that killed over 200 U.S. Marines in Beirut. Fifth, at least once a week the television set blared out a noxious series of audio tones otherwise referred to as the theme song from "Growing Pains," a sound that still haunts me to this day. Sixth, I not only went to but also survived that adolescent experience we call high school. All of these events--and a million others--gave most of us sweaty palms for roughly ten years. Fortunately, the 1980s also saw a plethora of action films released under the Cannon Films banner. If not for Michael Dudikoff, Charles Bronson, and Chuck Norris it is unlikely any of us would have survived the decade.
The same director who brought us "The Prowler" and a "Friday the 13th" sequel, Joseph Zito, lensed the Chuck Norris vehicle "Invasion U.S.A." It's a chilling story about a vicious KGB agent named Rostov (Richard Lynch) and his plans to undermine our country. The idea is simplicity itself: take a few hundred Latin American communists badly in need of a shower and shave, land them on the beaches of Florida, and drive around wiping out symbols of American domesticity. Rostov and his goons drive into a quiet American neighborhood, pull out a rocket launcher, and start leveling houses. These redski thugs plant bombs on school buses, pose as cops to attack ethnic minority street parties, launch assaults on shopping malls, break speed limits, jaywalk, and on occasion resort to littering all in an effort to turn us against each other. The nerve of these guys! Just in case you aren't aware that these terrorists are really, really bad guys, the movie shows Rostov killing the guy responsible for selling his troops weapons, a sweaty miscreant named Mickey (Billy Drago), and his tacky girlfriend. Our affable KGB agent even throws Mickey's gal out the window after perforating her nose with a coke straw! Blow his head off, I say!
We don't have a chance against this force until Matt Hunter (Chuck Norris) arrives on the scene. Billions of dollars spent on intelligence, arms, and hundreds of thousands of highly trained soldiers can't compare to one ex-CIA operative clad in tight jeans with two machine gun pistols draped across his shoulders. The government approaches our hero with a request to rejoin the fight against his old enemy Rostov, but Hunter is too busy roping in alligators out in the Florida swamps to bother with such trivialities. Until Rostov shows up to murder Matt's best friend and level his home, that is. A now angry Hunter zooms around Florida in a pickup truck impervious to all weapons up to and including nuclear bombs, thwarting the terrorists at every turn. Plan on attacking a church with a satchel of explosives? Matt Hunter doesn't take kindly to that sort of rude behavior. Got a hankering for spraying bullets at a crowded grocery store? Matt Hunter will tell you in no uncertain terms to go hit the showers. Magnetic bomb on a school bus? Not when Matt Hunter's patrolling the highways and byways of America, you don't! By the time the government finally gets around to fielding some troops, our protagonist has it all figured out. And Rostov's hatred for his old nemesis Matt Hunter so blinds him to rational thought that he and his men walk right into a deadly trap. Matt Hunter one, terrorists zero.
"Invasion U.S.A." ranks as one of the most ridiculous action films of the 1980s as well as one of the most ridiculous Cannon releases, and that's saying something when one considers Bronson's "Death Wish 3." Every character in the film is a one-dimensional stereotype, from the good guys to the bad guys to the indigent female reporter McGuire (Melissa Prophet). I can't remember a film where so many cast members exist only to die in violent ways. And it's a rare action film that contains so many unintentional laughs. For instance, one guy who perishes early on reappears later as a background extra. I'm not kidding. He's right there for the whole world to see. Then there is Matt Hunter's ability to roar out of nowhere in his supertruck just in time to stop the latest terrorist shenanigans. How does Hunter know when and where the commies are about to strike? The script told him. Amazing that the police and military can't pull the same trick, isn't it? Lest you think I'm unduly picking on the film, one sequence does require us to think. Hunter drives into the city only to witness scene after of scene of poor Americans acting up in the slums. A message that America isn't worth saving unless we get our act together, perhaps? Who knows? Who cares, for that matter.
MGM apparently bought the rights to many of Cannon's old action films and has been releasing them to DVD over the last year or two. The roaring lion doesn't really respect most of these movies, however, since nearly all of them come with a fullscreen picture transfer and only a trailer as an extra. Yet we must admire MGM for distributing these boilerplates for a new generation of film fans. These pictures were the bread and butter of cable television back in the 1980s, and as bad as most of them are in a technical sense it's still fun to watch them now.
Movie Review: The army of Chuck
Summary: 3 Stars
Anyone around in the 80's, when Nancy Regan told us to 'just say no', the US military was paying $900 for a hammer, and and Member's Only jackets were cool, will have most likely had the experience of seeing a Cannon film. For better or worse, the Golan/Globus group were quite prolific, and their movies tended to focus on visceral elements to satisfy the public, while other aspects like a credible plot, believable story, or realistic characters got swept under the rug, but hey, it worked pretty well and they made great gobs of money (I'd be happy with a single gob of money myself). This is the company responsible for such films as American Ninja and it's sequels, Sylvester Stallone classics as Over the Top (it's Rocky, but instead of boxing, it's arm wrestling...where's Joel and the 'bots when you need them?) and Cobra, Superman and it's sequels, Deathwish 2 thru 5, Missing in Action movies, Delta Force, and Invasion U.S.A, to name a few. During the 80's, the Cannon EZ Bake movie machine churned out up to 15 movies per year up until it's bankruptcy in 1990. One thing for certain, if it was a Cannon movie, you were pretty sure to get big guns, car chases, people getting shot, people getting blowed up real good, and lots of explosions, and Invasion U.S.A certainly doesn't disappoint. The antagonistic roles in these movies often was decided by how the political winds blew at the time. Be it the Russians or the Arabs or whoever angered us, you could be sure they would show up as an evil force in a Cannon movie bent on destroying the Amaerican way of life. Things you weren't guaranteed to get were cohesive plots, character development, continuity, and credibility. These were testosterone fueled, shoot-em up explosion orgies intended to entertain without requiring a lot of thought.Invasion U.S.A. features Cannon perennial Chuck Norris as Matt Hunter. Matt is an ex-operative of some government agency, we're never told which one, so I'll guess it's the CIA. He lives in the middle of a swamp, I'm assuming Florida, as much of the action in the movie takes place in Miami. Why he'd want to live in the middle of a swamp by himself I don't know, but maybe it has something to do with his past work with the CIA and just wanting to leave it all behind.
Soon we are introduced to our lead bad guy, Mikhail Rostov, played by Richard Lynch. You may not recognize the name, but you'd most likely recognize the face. He's had quite a career in movies and TV, generally always playing a bad guy, due to his somewhat sinister look. Eventually we learn he's planning an invasion of the USA and a small army of armed men hit the beach. Their plans involve dressing up like authority figures, attacking civilians, and causing civil unrest. Apparently, Rostov and Hunter have a past history, as Rostov wants to eliminate Hunter. Once it's discovered that Rostov is in the US, the agency tries to get the now retired Hunter back into action, but he declines, as he says they should have let him kill Rostov when he had the chance, and it's now their problem, not his. Rostov, still bearing a super sized grudge, finds Hunter's place in the swamp and blows it up real good, but doesn't manage to kill Hunter. Along with his house, they also killed his friend, and now Hunter decides to take on the mission. Naturally the agency says that if he is caught, they will have to disavow any knowledge of Hunter. By now, I am starting to wish I could disavow any knowledge of this movie....
We get various scenes of the bad guys blowing stuff up, killing Americans here and there, and talking about how weak we are, how easy it is to kill us. One scene in particular is when they pull up into a suburb and start blowing up houses. Rostov shoots like six houses with a bazooka, and it must have been one of those spiffy auto-loading kind as I never saw him reload once. I always thought bazookas were one shot deals, and needed to be reloaded after each use, but what do I know?
Anyway, Hunter mixes it up with terrorists he finds, dispatching them usually with twin uzis strapped to his chest. He takes out large numbers of terrorists with much ease. This all leads up to a final confrontation, where a trap is set for the terrorist army, and the fall for it. The terrorists end up fighting the army in a fairly large battle, while Hunter and Rostov square off and guess who comes out a live in the end? Rostov is dispatched in a typically spectacular fashion, as is par for these kinds of movies, and the day is saved. Oh yeah, I alomst forgot, there is a side story involving a female reporter, but that goes nowhere, so it's not really worth mentioning.
Given what this movie was, there a couple of things that kind of annoyed me. One was the attempt to present it as somewhat patriotic. This was a common theme at the time this movie came out, but looking at it now, it seems so transparent. And Chuck Norris really didn't get to use his martial arts skills in this movie. He hit and kicked a couple of people, but why cast a martial arts expert in an action movie if you aren't going to allow him to use his skills? Seems like such a waste. Even at the end, when he's fighting Rostov hand to hand, they could have incorporated some into that, but they blew it. Oh well....If you want a no brainer actioneer with lots of guns and explosions and little or not plot, then this movie is for you.