I remember, in my very early teens, seeing video store posters for Invasion U.S.A and being really keen to see it. I mean, look at that image above. Pitched battles outside the US Capitol! Chuck Norris with Uzis akimbo! I looks like some kind of deliriously terrible-but-entertaining mashup of Red Dawn (which I had seen and loved) and Megaforce (which I had not, but dearly wanted to). However, due to its R-rating in Australia, I wasn't old enough to rent it myself and there was no way my parents were going to rent schlock like this for me.
By the time I was old enough to rent it, Invasion U.S.A was not exactly common stock in your local Blockbuster and it is only now, in the modern age of streaming, that I can finally sit down to watch this cinematic white whale of mine.
They do say you should never meet your heroes, and alas, the reality of Invasion U.S.A is not in any way the movie I had in my head. Instead, it's a resolutely po-faced "thriller" that's determined to lecture the audience on how dangerous it is for us to go on allowing our citizens to have freedom of movement and assembly. Why, in doing so we are basically inviting Cuban-based Soviet insurgents to stream ashore in a mass amphibious landing!
These insurgents immediately begin a coordinated series of attacks designed to trigger disorder and confusion: random murder sprees in suburban towns, dressing up as police officers to gun down urban teenagers (I guess 35 years ago people were not aware of how often real police officers do this) and so on. For reasons that I ascribe to the basic puerility of the script, the leader of this campaign is a Russian agent with a particular penchant for shooting other men in the penis.
Apparently the only man who can stop all this is Matt Hunter (Norris), a retired and disgruntled former CIA agent who has a person beef with old penis-shooter. Lots of not terribly interesting shooty shooty ensues, before Hunter's inevitable and equally uninteresting victory.
Witless nonsense, and not the so-bad-it's-good Hard Ticket to Hawaii kind of nonsense.
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