Invasion U.S.A. (1985) We'll admit it....nobody enjoyed the prolific, Golden era of Cannon Films more than we did.
As a video-store movie buyer, we profited from filling store shelves with the endless junk pumped out by the Israeli 'Go Go' boys, cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.
Back in those dawn-of-homevideo days, movie lovers looking for a VHS night pick were far easier to please......if all the copies of the latest big studio hit were rented out, there was plenty of Cannon crapola available to them......which they did indeed rent....(God help 'em).
And 'Invasion U.S.A.' was prime Cannon carnage, featuring one of the company's resident stars, the forever stone-faced martial artist Chuck Norris.
Norris, bearded and devoid of even the slightest glimmer of human expression, marches through this disjointed film dispensing death to an entire army of fresh off the boat terrorists.
Leading this massed assortment of paramilitary goons is literally a Mad Russian, played by one of the most distinctive movie villains ever, Richard Lynch.
An intense, stage trained actor, the blonde Lynch came to specialize in madmen monsters and all around really scary people. Kind of like the Grindhouse Rutger Hauer.
He's all kinds of fun to watch here, since Norris does nothing but slaughter entire clusters of terrorists with his twin machine guns.
But then again slaughter dominates this film for its entire running time. The barely-there script only serves to loosely connect the ever increasing pile-up of massacres.
Whatever's going on in Norris's mind as he goes about harvesting fresh kills, we'll never know. Lynch on the other hand, rants, raves and practically foams at the mouth.
To kick things off the Lynch-inator machine guns dozens of Latino refugees, whose boat was concealing the drugs he smuggled to finance his war on America.
Then we're off to battle with Lynch only stopping a few times to execute gangsters who betrayed him....(with his method of choice, sticking his gun down their pants to blast away at their genitalia.....)
The terrorist army sure knows how to make a statement. Right in the middle of the Christmas season, they lay waste to a picture postcard suburban neighborhood with rocket launchers. Then they move on to a crowded mall with a big bomb......but wait!
Our man Chucky, always on the spot, shows up to have it out with the bad guys. And in a pitched battle, together they leave that mall in even worse shape than the one in 'The Blues Brothers'.
More random chaos ensues, but Chuck-o-rama's always there to thwart the worst of the attacks......(when Lynch's merry crew tries to bomb a church and a school bus, Chuck's conveniently on site to grab the bombs and toss them right back 'em.
Watching this 40 years after its release, here's what strikes us about this film.......it presents multiple scenes of the slaughter of innocent people with little or no genuine emotion. (Its obvious, falsely maudlin attempts to humanize the victims reek of calculated phoniness.)
'Invasion U.S.A.' exists solely to goose viewers who only came to revel in explosions and countless bodies shredded by automatic weapons. Since Norris remains as animated as a corpse throughout, there's nothing this movie has to offer but the bam-bam-bams and kebooms.
If that's all you're looking for in an action movie, than this one's for you. If you demand something a little extra.....like, you know, the little things like real acting, story, script and dialogue, pass it by.....it's just a Monster Truck ralley with a lot of extra gunfire...
1 & 1/2 stars (*1/2)
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