NOV 1st

BLACK CATS ON HALLOWEEN

This pretty feral comes to visit from time to time.

TH12th

PUMPKIN SPICE EVERYTHING

 

#1: COMMANDO (1985)

Let's party!

John Matrix, former commando, has retired from the commando profession and is trying to make a normal non-commando life (here) in the mountains of Cal-ee-for-nee-a with his daughter, Jenny, who is all that matters to him (now). Together, they share a life of deer-petting, vanilla-ice-cream-swapping, basic-defense-moves-teaching, and light kissing on the lips. John Matrix, it would seem, is out of the life. But someone has made a big mistake: former commandos of Matrix's platoon are being killed off one by one, and Matrix is next on their kill list. General Franklin Kirby, once-mentor of Matrix, flies in with reinforcements to Matrix's isolated mountain home to warn of the danger. Kirby then departs, leaving behind a handful of soldiers as protection for Matrix and his daughter. Not long after, a wave of mercenaries led by Arius, the former president of Val Verde, storm Matrix's house, kill the soldiers, and kidnap Jenny. Matrix can have her back...for a price: he must assassinate the new president of Val Verde, whom Matrix helped install after dethroning Arius. These commando-traitors thought they could get John Matrix to do their bidding. They thought they could control him. WRAWNG. With the help of Cindy, a spunky flight attendant and tardy student of an eight o'clock advanced karate class, John Matrix pledges to get his daughter back...and re-embraces the commando life, unleashing an explosion of bloody and pun-filled revenge that the bad guys never saw coming. From the warlords of Val Verde right down to the most anonymous henchman—all whom eventually cross paths with Commando John Matrix soon realize that they have...no...chance.

Here we are, on the last stop of the Top Ten Murdered Men Express. It's all led to this moment. It's dropped us off here in the middle of man-made carnage. Fires burn, houses disintegrate down to their rafters and beyond, men are cut down with bullets and grenades and bowie knives and the bare hands of the deranged and the dedicated. There is no greater exhilaration one can experience from an action film than the unfettered, untempered, unparalleled ecstasy that Commando can provide.

Even that title...Sweet Jesus Lord. Commando.

The sensation one feels on their lips when saying it must be tantamount to the feeling of laying post-coital with Aphrodite herself, or one experienced by heart surgeons when saving a life, or tweeting the perfect 140 characters and having it retweeted by, like, a hundred people. Commando is magic. It's imperfect perfection. It is everything the action genre never knew it could be, nor would ever dare to attempt. In exactly the same way Walton et. al looked at the atom in 1932 and said, "Shouldn't we split this?," 20th Century Fox looked at the script for Commando and said, "Shouldn't we make this?" Both feats are of equal importance, and both have contributed to the betterment of man ever since.

Written by Steven E. de Souza, who will always be looked upon as a god in the eyes of true action fans (when one writes Commando, the first two Die Hards, 48 Hours, The Running Man, and hell yeah, Ricochet, it'd be treasonous to describe the man as anything less than preternatural), and directed by Class of 1984's Mark L. Lester, Commando is it. Why they bothered to continue making action films once Commando left the can and brutalized audience eyes in 1985, one will never know. Somehow, despite everything, stellar action films continued to hit multiplexes in the years following Commando's release, along with them Die Hard, long rumored to be an unofficial Commando sequel.

With Commando, the distinction between what makes a film good and what makes a film fun has never been more pronounced. And Commando is fun. Always and forever. It's fun when your dog bites you, when your wife leaves you, when your kids wish you weren't their father, and when you've just gotten back from a funeral. If you were just laid off, come home and put on Commando. If you've just caught your partner in bed with someone most certainly not you, climb down out of your pity chair, slide that battered Commando VHS into your VCR, and adjust the tracking. When Commando cuts to black and the credits roll, don't frown because it's over, grin because when God made heaven and earth, he also created rewind. Watching Commando once is awesome; watching it twice is divine.

From first minute till the last, Commando is a cartoon. The title alone sounds like something you'd hear blasting from the television in the nearest playroom come Saturday morning. Nothing about how Commando plays out is realistic or believable. John Matrix is neither realistic nor believable—not in his skills, and not in the impossible things he can do. Watch as he carries an entire tree on his shoulder, or tears a seat from a car with one arm, or rips steel apart with his bare hands, or throws an entire phone booth—complete with man inside—over his head, or fights off twelve men at once, or pushes over a car, or holds a man up over a cliffside with only his "weak arm." Nothing John Matrix does or can do is even remotely possible, which is why he surpasses heroism and achieves godliness.

In keeping with this cartoon aesthetic, the bad guys of Commando literally hail from the land of make-believe. Val Verde was a popular destination in which to set action films during the 1980s, as screenwriter de Souza felt it best to attribute terrorist activities to a fictional country so as not to inadvertently ruffle political or diplomatic feathers. Keeping it vaguely Spanish and somewhat third-world, it easily blends in with the rest of that miscellaneous segment of the world about which Americans know nothing. (This region of the world is typically referred to as "not America.") [Fun fact: Val Verde is also the island where Dutch and co. hunt a flesh-ripping Predator and where terrorist General Esperanza is being held captive before he is freed in Die Hard 2, not to mention a handful of other references, one which includes dinosaurs. Based on these events, Val Verde is the worst place to live in all of humanity.]

Commando is about exactly two things: pride and murder. Even though Matrix flat-out confesses, "All that matters to [him] now is Jenny," the impression left from her kidnapping and his subsequent blood-soaked recovery mission is that Bennett et al. could have instead stolen his axe handle, or his Bronco, or the rest of the mysterious sandwich he chomps during the opening moments—anything, at all, so long as it belonged to him—and it still would have resulted in Matrix taking so many lives even the plague is in awe. Because if we're to accept the character of John Matrix as presented to us, he needs to kill. Not because he enjoys it, but because it's in his DNA. Because he's a master of the mutilation. Years before Jason Bourne was choking people out with rolled-up magazines and dishtowels, John Matrix was killing people with literally anything at all.

What makes Commando such compelling entertainment is that, like the T-800, it simply doesn't care about anything, and it has no agenda except to be fun. It wants to offer a terrific 90 minutes of very little exposition (just enough to propel the conflict forward) and metric tons of testosterone-fueled mayhem. From obligatory boob shots to impressively multi-variant ways of dispatching men that would put the entire slasher-movie sub-genre to shame, Commando isn't just everything and the kitchen sink, but it's an entire multi-billion dollar industrial complex assembled from nothing but kitchen sinks, forged from galvanized steel and the ruined bones of human men. It's Commando's utter lack of pretension and full-on embracing of fun that makes it so involving. Though much of Commando plays far funnier than was likely intended when it was released in theaters forty years ago, make no mistake that Commando knew exactly what kind of film it was, as did everyone involved in its creation. One of the very first, if not the first, to arm both good guys and bad with an entire platoon of quips and jokes and sarcastic comeback responses, Commando snuck in late to the meeting of the action movies, listened to everyone complain about social issues and the perversion of man, and said, "Don't be so depressing all the time. Let's party!"

There's not much substance within Command's running time beyond "Matrix good guy, kill bad guys!" and that's totally fine. Frankly, it's what the action genre needed—to transform it into something new, and to strive for live-action cartoon levels of spectacular destruction at which all you can do is laugh, because good god damn, this is all happening right in front of you, for real, and there has never been anything better.

THE GOOD GUY

John Matrix. Retired colonel. East German. Deer feeder. Vanilla ice-cream swapper. Daring food enthusiast. Boy George belittler. Old joke maker. Unmellow. Amateur auto mechanic. Failed solicited assassin. Accomplished unsolicited assassin. Paranoid maniac.

Arnold.

Schwarzenegger.

The man who created the term "action star." The man who has appeared in some of the most iconic films of the genre (the Cameron Terminators, Total Recall, Conan the Barbarian) as well as beloved cult classics (Kindergarten Cop, Last Action Hero). The man who created the perfect action character, in the perfect action film, offering the perfect action film experience.

Much like Matt Hunter, Chuck Norris' Invasion U.S.A. alter-ego, Arnold Schwarzenegger pretty much approaches John Matrix the same as he did the T-800 in The Terminator—as an emotionless killing machine—only Matrix isn't a cybernetic organism with living tissue over a metal endoskeleton, but an actual, honest-to-gosh skin-covered man. That he lacks the emotions and anything resembling human behavior much like that of the T-800 is what makes John Matrix such a wonderful hero. His emotionless approach to taking lives is similar to Matt Hunter for that reason, but it's less because Matrix is a sociopath and more that his tendency to eat sandwiches and wear sport coats is the only thing keeping him catalogued as a human being. Arnold's take on John Matrix can be easily summarized by the following: if Jenny is around, smile; if she's not, frown. This may sound like an oversimplification of Arnold's '80s-era range as an actor as well as development of his character, but it's sincerely not: Arnold smiles non-stop through the daddy-daughter opening montage, frowns when she's taken, and continues to frown the entire film—that is, of course, until they are reunited at the end, and the smile he flashes her looks like no natural smile any human being has ever presented. But it's the frown we'll see nearly the entire ride. It's The Matrix Frown. It's a constant meshing of anger and confusion. It signifies a man on a mission who will stop at nothing until he can solve all kinds of riddles and be various levels of pissed off while doing so. And he's pissed off by nearly everything he encounters: by the bad guys who steal his daughter and riddle his home with bullets, by the emotional instability exhibited by the saucy stewardess he forces into helping him, by the mall security cops only doing their job, by the barred windows of the nearest neighborhood gun shop, and even by his old friend and mentor Franklin Kirby, with whom he'll have a silence showdown at the conclusion of the film—after having taken the lives of a hundred men—because he'll be fucked in half if he's going to speak first.

If one were to look up the term "man" in a hyperbolic dictionary filtered through the chasm of action cinema, the definition would simply be "John Matrix." And with Commando having been released in 1985, he's not just a man, but a Reagan man, an American man. He is everything the idea of the American man embodies, nothing superfluous and nothing lacking. He is the man that other men don't even bother endeavoring to be, because they know such a goal is unobtainable. It's like striving toward being Apollo or God himself. And why bother with such fruitless dreams? Sure, a man might cut down a tree with a chainsaw, but a man will forgo using that chainsaw to turn that tree trunk into firewood, instead opting to chop it with an axe. A man may joke with his daughter about the odd singer she likes to read about, but a man will be sure to impugn that singer's appearance and identity by labeling him a "girl" so as to avoid sharing the definition of a "man" with such an effeminate spectacle. A man, in a time of emotional strife, may request the assistance of a woman who could prove resourceful, but a man will rip her shirt down the middle to reveal her cleavage and demand she play the part of tramp bait to trap his prey. A man, in desperate times, may rely on the entire god damn army at his immediate disposal, but a man will just fucking do everything himself, because he's the only army he'll ever need.

The name "Matrix," defined as "a mold in which something is cast or shaped," wasn't chosen after a bout of random brainstorming. It's not telling you that when John Matrix manifested the mold was broken. It's telling you that John Matrix created the mold, and no other man would ever properly fill it. Within the context of the film, this becomes especially interesting for one reason: in the first act, when Kirby tells Matrix that "someone is killing [his] men," Matrix replies, "but you gave them new identities." With Matrix living isolated in the California mountains, it becomes possible that he, too, has been given a new identity. And someone—either himself or someone else—chose the surname "Matrix." Regardless of who, the etymology was obviously inspired by a bout of almost masturbatory adoration—that if the man now known as "Matrix" had to live within the confines of a new identity, let it be known that he is the alpha male of all time. His birth name may have been stripped, but his masculine legacy never would be. As alpha male, at no point should he not be dominating every square foot of space he enters. At no point should he not be killing, nor not on his way to the killing. Because that's what a man does. He kills. In excess, and with flair. At times there are so many gun battles, or fist battles, that composer James Horner, who inappropriately and appropriately littered his musical score with inexplicable steel drums, exhaustively throws his wand in surrender at the scoring screen and falls heavily back in his chair, allowing extended portions of said battles to play out in beautiful awkward silence. And during these same battles, some tinged by music and some not, the firearms Matrix uses to sheer away layers of his enemy transform from shot to shot, from assault rifle to handgun to shotgun, as if all the weapons in the world cannot possibly keep up with the rate at which he takes lives. Because of Commando's utter lack of subtlety as it pertains to exemplifying Matrix's masculinity, it chooses the most primal of ways to display it using one single and unmistakable image: testicles—weighty, engorged, dangling—personified by the loose grenades hanging from his kill-vest, bouncing haphazardly on their nylon slipknots as he runs from one kill-point to the next.

In the midst of all the Matrix murder, note the film never ceases to fetishize Schwarzenegger's physique, from the opening act close-up on his muscles to his stripping down to a Speedo for the row from the plane to the island of San Nicolas. Up until then, his partner in crime, Cindy the stewardess, has been his willing accomplice, but upon his peeling off down to his skivvies, offering her a bird's eyes view of his presentation, her entire attitude toward him changes. No longer is she his platonic partner, but rather she becomes weak in the knees at the sight of him. "Good luck, Matrix," she says in a breathy whisper, moving her hair away from her face. And as Matrix rows away, the camera close on his unclothed throbbing pectorals, her eyes remain glued on him. She's clearly in awe of him in this moment, as the audience likely is, only her awe is now tinged with lust.

In addition to John Matrix being the ideal man, he's also the ideal soldier. In Commando, both of those statuses blur together into an incestuous smorgasbord of hilarious masculinity. One cannot be a man without being a soldier, and the reverse. In the film's opening when Bennett et al. begin to unleash their impressive artillery upon the Matrix mountain home, the soldiers left there by General Kirby to "protect" Matrix and his daughter are nearly immediately neutralized. Matrix, having sensed the enemy's approach before his so-called protection detail, dives quickly to the ground, leaving nearby soldier Jackson to be wounded in the attack.

"I've got to get my rifle from the shed," Matrix tells him. And as far as the approaching enemy: "Keep an eye out, they'll be coming. Remember, you're downwind. The air current will tip them off."

"Downwind?" the wounded Jackson incredulously asks. "You think I could smell them coming?"

"I did," Matrix replies sanctimoniously.

It's not enough that John Matrix could smell the enemy coming—that would be ridiculous enough on its own—but it's the "remember" that paints Matrix in this constant aura of superiority.

"Remember, they're down wind."

As if to say: "You knew that, right? You're on my level, right? Because we're both soldiers, and therefore both capable of the same skills...right?"

WRAWNG.

Of course the poor injured soldier isn't on Matrix's level. No one is nor ever could be. John Matrix exists one step beyond the end of the Linnaeun classification system. Forget "species." Matrix is beyond that. He's a freak of nature, a fluke of bad biology. He is a creation whose manliness and penchant for killing manages to completely supersede his utter lack of intelligence or common sense. Make no mistake: though John Matrix solves every problem that comes his way, he solves it either with brute force, idiocy, or by kidnapping someone who might prove to be useful. When John Matrix attempts to chase down his daughter's kidnappers in his Bronco, but discovers they have purposely dismantled the engine and ripped out the brakes, he literally pushes the useless vehicle off the side of the mountain and rides it all the way down with not even a mere inkling of a plan in his mind beyond, "I'm on top of mountain; need to be at bottom of mountain; FAST." And when John Matrix stands outside his steel-reinforced murder shed and punches in a super-secret passcode, for some reason only two digits—ONE, THREE—to unveil so many different weapons of human evisceration that this film could have only been made in America, you will learn Commando's one and only valuable life lesson: thinking bad; killing good.

The original draft of the script actually includes references to a backstory that threaten to humanize the Matrix character, such as an explanation for why Mrs. Matrix/Jenny's mother is no longer in the picture (she's passed on), or why Matrix is so adamant about rescuing Jenny beyond the obvious reasons (because he's missed out on every major turning point in her life due to his commandoing), or that Matrix is capable of showing empathy toward another human being (like when he patches up a wound on Cindy's leg), or lastly, at the end, during which Matrix and Cindy's romantic future seems more concrete (when Kirby mentions that Matrix and Jenny will need another two new identities, leading Matrix to cast a glance to Cindy and say, "this time we'll need three"). All of this was purposely removed—not for time, as their additions would have been negligible, but because someone made the wise choice to portray John Matrix as barely human. (Some of this is preserved in the lesser-seen director's cut.)

Though John Matrix lacks such little substance as a character that anyone could have played him, only Arnold Schwarznegger's version of John Matrix would have been worth watching a hundred times.

As the entire world knows, Arnold "retired" from acting in 2003 to pursue what would soon become a two-term role as governor of California. When that came to an end, old school actions fans were hoping that Arnold would return to silver screens everywhere and rejoin the action empire he'd help to transform. Encouraging reports that the Austrian Oak had stacks upon stacks of scripts on his desk and was perusing each one to find the perfect comeback vehicle filled genre enthusiasts with hope. After a very brief cameo in the well-meaning first entry in Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables series, Arnold returned, for realsies, in 2012's severely underrated modern western The Last Stand. His Unforgiven of sorts (an aging law man called into combat once more), the script's light touch, and infusion of welcome humor, in theory, was the perfect comeback vehicle. Offering exciting action set-pieces without the ridiculous spectacle of End of Days or Terminator 3, The Last Stand proved that even if Arnold was no longer capable of embodying the kind of physical intimidation bordering on absurdity showcased in films like Commando and Predator, he could at least still embody his bigger-than-life presence and remind older audiences why they gravitated toward him in the first place: his dry and quick humor, his iconic accent, and the perfect image created when he's grasping a firearm of any variety. Same said for Escape Plan, in which Arnold and Sly finally share significant screen time...about twenty years too late, but still entertaining and unique. Later would come Sabotage, the ensemble film from David Ayer, a radical take on Ten Little Indians. With a grating script and extremely unlikable characters, the film ended up being a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas, immense studio interference, and an obviously tacked on ending attempting to appeal to devotees of Arnold's entire filmography and persona. Though the film itself is a failure, Arnold at least deserves credit for having agreed to take on what was originally the villainous, mysterious killer, only to have that villainy stripped from his character and then reapplied to...the crackhead. And then comes Maggie, a surprisingly intimate and low-key film in which he offered up one of the best performances in his career so far. Sadly, it's remained very little seen. 

Following the box office disappointment of the newest and lamest Terminator, all eyes are on Arnold's next potential move, though that's not a sure thing. Not one of Arnold's post-political career films has set the box office ablaze the way he had perfected during the '80s and '90s, considering that his first comeback film, The Last Stand, is far better than any film he's made since 1994's True Lies.

Arnold's constant promises of "I'll be back" have so far never rung insincere—when he says it, he means it, and he follows through on it. The problem is audiences aren't back—at least, not the ones who comprise the bulk of box-office receipts come Sunday night. Arnold has over a combined 15 million followers on Twitter and Facebook, and yeah, it's much easier (and freer) to follow an actor on social media than spend the $10 on a movie ticket, but why aren't half of these fans and followers coming out to the theater? Where the hell are they come opening weekend? Maybe it's because, like many other pop culture phenomena from yesteryear, these call backs to older action stars and extinct action concepts just don't interest newer audiences. Unless their action hero is slapping on that fucking cape and grasping giant Nordic hammers, or driving cars out of building windows and into other building windows, audiences have no idea what to make of such things. One man, a normal everydayer, flipping cars and flying jets and carrying entire tree trunks? "What is this? What's going on? Where's the CGI and the bloodless violence and Scarlett Johansson?"

Arnold's reign as box-office superstar may be over, and while sad, that's okay, because it was inevitable. It wasn't only Arnold's ego that's led him to so many achievements in his life, but also his intelligence, and the dude is wise enough to know that there may be no reclaiming the opening-weekend domination game. This is why Maggie came to be, a film in which he not only doesn't mow down dozens of zombies at a time while chomping a cigar, but a film in which he's not even the lead character. Arnold's never going to turn his back on cinema, but he's aware there are certain roles he's no longer going to play. And when that day comes when Arnold does, perhaps, choose to retire from acting and focus all his energy on his numerous philanthropic efforts, those who worship him will always have his catalog from which to pluck whenever the mood strikes, and every new film given to us during this new era of his career will be a gift— even the stinkers—because they could've so easily never happened.

THE BAD GUY

"Bennett." Fake fisherman. Comeback lacker. Laugher at tough-talking soldiers. Fearer of John Matrix. Man with an edge/possessor of a daughter.

Vernon Wells is likely most famous for his villainous turn in The Road Warrior as Wez, the mohawked hockey-masked psychopath, but it's his role of Bennett that seems to follow the man everywhere, and for reasons both good and bad.

As for the good, Vernon Wells throws everything into his performance as Bennett and he's 100% willing to look absolutely ridiculous. Every line of dialogue slithers out of his mouth with a certain kind of intended or unintended sexual deviance. There's no scenery he won't chew, and there's no "top" over which he won't go. It doesn't matter that the whole "kidnap the daughter to force the hand" idea is a total paradox. (He admits to being scared of Matrix, but that his fear is canceled out by the "edge" he possesses, which is his daughter...but if he'd never kidnapped her in the first place, he'd have no reason to be fearful of Matrix...and since his plan was to kill the daughter regardless if Matrix fulfilled his obligations or not anyway, well...) And it doesn't matter that he risked his life by taking part in a bogus boat bomb in order to fake his death, but which wasn't witnessed by anyone except other bad guys already in on the scheme, rendering the whole facade totally useless. And it doesn't matter that he tells Matrix he was offered money to kill him but said he'd do it for free just for the chance, yet never considered exacting revenge upon Matrix until he was offered money. Wells' shrieking, leather/chain-covered sociopath outdoes all of the film's go-nowhere machinations strictly through sheer presence. In a way, Bennett is the perfect screen villain, because his role is just as enjoyable to watch as the hero's, and that seldom happens.

But the audience adores Bennett for other reasons...

Only in a film like Commando would we willingly believe that the doughy and BDSM-dressed Bennet could ever be a physical match to John Matrix. Whether standing face to face or engaged in knife-to-knife combat, the mere idea that not only are these two men squaring off against each other, but could actually match each other pound for pound, demands more suspension of disbelief and audience forgiveness than the entire climax of The Dark Knight Rises. When Bennett utters lines like, "You're getting old, John!" and delivers a healthy blow to John's kidney, it's hard not to laugh out loud, because (despite the fact that Wells is two years younger than Schwarzenegger in real life) Bennett's physical appearance alone adds the illusion of an additional ten years of age over Matrix, at the minimum. This is less to do with mocking Wells' appearance, who even by inflated Hollywood standards wasn't exactly ghastly, but it has more to do with how any man would look paired up against a shirtless and musclebound Arnold Schwarzenegger at the upper echelons of his girth. The film's already gone out of its way to establish that John Matrix carries entire trees around his property, but yet he somehow experiences difficulty when attempting to physically dominate some guy who looks like an unhappy middle-aged husband/father unpacking shirts on a Macy's loading dock.

Would it have made more sense for Schwarzenegger to square off against someone that at least embodied an equalized physical rival, someone like Stallone or Lundgren, or even his friends Franco Columbo or Sven-Ole Thorsen, both who appeared in many of Arnold's earlier films? Of course it does. But even if a more intimidating presence had taken on the villainous role, would it have had the same effect? As discussed in the entry for Hard Target, a different choice that may improve a film on its surface may not necessarily improve how much enjoyment the audience finds with it. In that regard, there is only one Bennett, and the idea of anyone else other than Vernon Wells playing him makes me laugh—and if he were here, he'd laugh, too.

THE BAD GUY'S HENCHMEN

The henchman has been a stalwart of the action genre for a long time now, but never has a film contained so many oddball and lovable mini-bad guys before this group of ragtag mercenaries named Cooke, Sully, Henriques, and Diaz (interview with them here) all found each other. Seeing them dispatched one after the other is like seeing a member of your own family get their breaths snuffed from their bodies, but only this time instead of being traumatic it's actually kind of hilarious. Though Bennett serves as the thematic main villain, being that the grudge he has against Matrix is personal, all of these men feel like adversaries that need to be subjugated.

Cooke (Bill Duke) is the tough-as-nails big Green Beret who, if Commando were trying to be a better film, would have embodied the main villain, simply because Bill Duke is an intimidating bad-ass.

Next is the beloved Sully (David Patrick Kelly), who plays the wormiest henchman in the history of wormy henchmen. Every line he utters manages to be more amazing than the one that preceded it; his is a character audiences love to hate. He doesn't walk, but saunter. He doesn't speak, but ooze. And he doesn't flirt, he mouth-rapes. If John Matrix's physicality were to transform and be quantified by scientific units of measurement based on sexual aggression, it would be called Sully.

Henriques (Charles Meshack) provides an interesting presence, dressed in atypical mercenary garb way too indicative of Pennywise the Clown's puffy jumpsuit. (His original demise, still taking place on an airplane, called for Matrix to stuff his corpse into an overhead storage compartment, which would have added an extra layer of morbidness to an already fairly morbid "joke.")

Then there's Diaz (Gary Carlos Cervantes), who has the honor of being Matrix's first kill, and a pretty significant one when considering the ramifications. Diaz's execution signifies that Matrix has no intention of going quietly into that good night. Diaz's demand of "mellow out, man!" is met with BANG.

And lastly, responsible for the scheme at hand is Arius (Dan Hedaya), the former president of Val Verde. Hedaya provides a curious hybrid accent that sounds Spanish, Colombian, Brooklyn, and strangely African all at once, something perhaps by purposeful design. He's likely the most recognizable and well-known actor in all of Commando (besides the obvious headliner, of course), making his appearance that much more welcome. The film attempts to make it look like he's the main villain of the piece, but the audience knows he's not—they know this the moment Bennett steps on-screen and seethes, "Payday!"

Without the presence of these mercenary misfits, John Matrix's journey from Los Angeles to Death Island would have been a lot less amusing, entertaining, and certainly bloody. Their collective and quite varying personalities define what makes ensemble casts work, and without any of them, something from Commando would have been clearly missing.

THE HOMOEROTICISM

For a long time, Commando has been dissected by fans and critics for its homoerotic undertones, which is just one more layer to this cinematic onion that makes the film so fascinating. By all accounts, it wouldn't be unfair to call Commando the gayest action film in cinema history. The inherent homoerotic content present in different aspects of Commando, from Bennett's wardrobe to some of the more on-the-nose-dialogue, has added fuel to the fire of that prevailing theory for quite a while now. The film's own director wouldn't agree with you, as he stated: "I don’t know what people are saying when they say that to me. [Bennett] seems to me like the most macho soldier or person you could think of." But others directly involved in the production would offer a counter-point, as did Rae Dawn Chong: "[Matrix and Bennett] are like lovers. The outfit they had on [Bennett], I mean, HELLO, he looks like one of the Village People. Arnold is the ideal, and if you can’t be it and can’t love it, you want to kill it. That really confusing sexuality comes through, and it manifests in violence." 

The act of watching Commando changes dramatically if the viewer maintains the subconscious theory that Bennett is warring against Matrix not because they need him for some bogus assassination attempt, but to exact revenge against him for his having thrown Bennett out of his unit after he'd confessed his love for his platoon leader and found that those feelings of devotion were very unrequited. From the too-tight SNL gay-bar wardrobe (which, in Wells' defense, had been fitted for the original "Bennett" actor whom Wells had replaced, said to be Wings Hauser) to the Freddie Mercury mustache to him lightly tickling the edge of his knife blade as he looks into a distant nowhere and says, "Welcome back, John...so glad you could make it," there is no denying that Bennett exudes a certain flamboyance that, in all seriousness, only makes his presence that much more cinematically appealing.

The "oops, it's gay!" dialogue ain't exactly in short supply, spoken by Bennett and non-Bennett folks alike:

"Silent and smooth, just like always!"

"When I knew I was going to get my hands on you, I said I'd do it for nothing."

"I don't need the girl!"

"John, I feel good! Just like old times!"

And then there's that unmistakable look of lust across Bennett's face when Matrix begins waving quite a large knife in his face, almost taunting him with it:

"It's me that you want. Come on, Bennett. Put the knife in me, and look in my eyes and see what's going on in there when you turn it. That's what you want to do, right? It's between you and me. Don't deprive yourself of some pleasure. C'mon, Bennett. Let's party."

In this moment, Matrix is finally acknowledging Bennett's lust and love, and he's using it against the man to throw him off guard and lure him into a trap. Bennett responds in kind: "I'm not going to shoot you between the eyes...I'm going to shoot you BETWEEN THE BALLS." As for the comeuppance of his character, two words: phallic penetration. (Spoiler.)

THE CASUALTIES

The Bad Guys

As for the henchmen with names, Diaz, urging for some mellowing out, gets a shotgun to the head; Henriques gets his neck broken on a plane and is left dead tired; Sully is let go...over a cliff; and as for Cooke, well, Matrix eats him for breakfast after turning him into shish kabob. As for the henchmen without names: one passport-provider takes a stray bullet and crashes over a mall railing; one head smashed against a giant concrete wall; two jeep-drivers shredded with an MP4; one stabbed in the gut; one throat cut (slowly); two catchers of throwing knives; one stabbed with some kind of...shooting knife...thing; one shot and plummeting from a watch tower; four shot down with an assault rifle; twelve blown up by controlled explosions; two shot with an AK-47; five blown to bits with a rocket launcher; eighteen shot with an AK-47; five blown up by grenades; seven shot by an MP4; two shot by a handgun; three torn apart by shotgun blasts; one pitchfork to the chest; two guys catch saw blades with their head and neck, respectively; one gets an underhanded axe to the stomach; one gets his arm maniacally cut off with a machete; twenty-three (maybe) are shredded by a chain gun; and Arius, the evil mastermind, gets shotgunned out the window. All in all, John Matrix murders the entire population of San Nicolas Island plus eight dudes.

The Good Guys

One very old and very retired commando gets cut down by a couple of fake garbage men. One former commando and now car salesmen gets run over by his own inventory. A few miscellaneous men may or may not be blown up by a confusing boat bomb. "Good-but-not-as-good-as-Matrix" soldiers Jackson and Harris get taken down by Diaz. A mall security guard takes a Sully bullet.

THE BEST KILL

Hands down, it's the demise of Sully that wins the top honor, and it's for one reason only: it's pure, unconvoluted, premeditated murder. Every man who loses his life against John Matrix during Commando's running time is because he was an immediate threat, grasping either a gun or a grenade. They were men who had deliberately placed themselves into harm's way, confident they could overcome this retired commando named John Matrix. But Sully wasn't one of these men. He wasn't challenging Matrix one-on-one in a cramped hotel room. He wasn't sitting cocksure in a chair, an assault rifle within easy range, taunting Matrix about his kidnapped daughter. He was, in fact, terrified of Matrix and was attempting to flee in his own car. Sure, he possessed vital information that led to the next big part of the puzzle, but he was a small, weak, wormy kind of guy who posed no physical threat.

After holding Sully over the cliffside to goad him into spilling all the diabolical beans, Matrix seems satisfied with the information provided.

"Remember, Sully, when I promised to kill you last?" Matrix teases.

"That's right, Matrix!" Sully agrees. "You did!"

Matrix not only lets Sully plummet to his death, but leans forward just the least bit for an unfettered view of man-on-rock contact.

This, of course, is followed by Cindy asking, "What did you do with Sully?"

"I let him go."

Terrific.

THE DAMAGE

John Matrix suffers a wound on his side, a few hits to the kidney, a gunshot to the shoulder, a knife slash to his chest, and a lead pipe to the body that, if he'd been a mere mortal, would've certainly broken his vertebrae. Not bad for a guy who jumps out of a plane and falls a thousand feet into a marsh, or who hurtles down a mountainside in a Bronco with no brakes, or who gets hit by a car, or who is shackled into a police van that's eventually pulverized by a rocket launcher and upended, or who drives a Porsche into a telephone pole at tremendous speed, or who gets blown backward by a grenade, or who hurls himself through a glass door.

THE BAD GUY'S COMEUPPANCE

Matrix and Bennett engage in a knife fight, a punch fight, a metal implements fight, and a fire fight (fire, not guns) before Bennett momentarily starts getting electrocuted by some circuitry but then decides to stop getting electrocuted and easily frees himself, not the last bit winded from the volts that had just coursed through his body. Sensing that he is losing the fight, Bennett grabs for a gun and threatens to shoot Matrix, who shouts his secret magic rejuvenation codeword ("BULLLLLLSHIT!") and impossibly rips a section of steel pipe off the wall, only to further impossibly hurl it through an entire human man and a steel boiler.

Matrix snarls, "Let off some steam, Bennett," who does just that.

THE LINE

"I'll be back, Bennett."

"Don't disturb my friend. He's dead tired."

"This used to be a great place for hunting slash."

"You feckin' whore."

"No."

"Trust me."

"Get fucked!"

"You're a funny guy, Sully, I like you. That's why I'm going to kill you last."

"Remember, Sully, when I promised to kill you last? I LIED."

"Fuck you, asshole."

"I eat Green Berets for breakfast. And right now, I'm very hungry."

"I can't believe this macho bullshit."

"We'll take Cooke's car. He won't be needing it."

"Come stà?" (Matrix keeps his greetings informal.)

"BUUUUULLSHIT!"

"Let off some steam, Bennett."

And, of course:

"Just bodies."

THE VERDICT

Commando, film of many joys,
Filled with senselessness for boys.
Had it been you never were,
There'd be no action connoisseur.

Commando with your lead so macho,
Forevermore you'll be head honcho.
Colonel Matrix, big and strong,
Ripping clothes off Rae Dawn Chong.

Jenny taken, Matrix shaken,
"Dead tired" Henriques - don't awaken!
Sully plunges to his death,
Cooke's last words are bloody breath.

A hundred men are no big deal,
Matrix cuts them up with zeal.
Arius forever screams,
Bennett fries and let's off steam.

From the lips of Franklin Kirby,
To the "country" of Val Verde.
Matrix squints against the breeze,
And then he mumbles, "Just bodies."

Commando, you're forever legend,
A cinematic carnage engine.
Could your might be one day matched?
Of course that's WRAWNG, there's just no chance.

I love you, Commando. Good night.

#2: INVASION U.S.A. (1985)

America wasn't ready...but HE was!

A group of communist guerrillas from Latin America, led by head commie Mikhail Rostov, invade the United States of America during the busy Christmas season and begin causing carefully constructed chaos throughout Florida communities. The CIA appeal to former colleague and retiree Matt Hunter, who trifled with Rostov on a past mission, to track down and neutralize his arch nemesis. Hunter, long out of the game, refuses, citing he's already spent enough time in the field dealing with death—that he had the chance to neutralize Rostov permanently, but was denied the authorization by his suit-wearing superiors. "He's your problem now," Hunter says, ending the meeting. Little does anyone know that Rostov is on his way to Hunter's isolated home in the swamp, along with a group of henchmen, to kill him, as Rostov considers him to be the only real possible threat to his country-wide domination. Hunter survives Rostov's attack, but his pet armadillo isn't so lucky, so Hunter sets off on a path of bearded destruction, chasing down and stabbing leads one at a time, until he comes face to face with the Russian brains behind the communist operation. Entire armies showdown in the streets of Miami, Christmas trees are bazooka'ed, shopping malls are destroyed, and men are metaphorically (and literally) castrated by the dozen. Hunter knows Rostov all too well—knows that he must be stopped, or else the United States will fall to the invading threat. Hunter knows that it's time to act. He knows that retirement's over, and it's time to strap on the uzis. He knows, simply, that...

It's...time.

Invasion U.S.A. was a friends-and-family affair—written by Chuck Norris alongside his brother, Aaron (who worked in creative capacities on many of Chuck's films, mostly as director, including another Norris achievement, The Hitman), and frequent collaborator James Bruner (who is credited to the screenplays for Chuck vehicles An Eye for an Eye, two Missing in Action entries, and The Delta Force). This team of writers, along with their Missing in Action director Joseph Zito (Dolph Lundgren's Red Scorpion), managed to create not just essential yearly Christmas viewing, but the most insane film in Chuck Norris' filmography. If Invasion U.S.A. is any indication of the darkness that dwells within Chuck Norris, then it's a damn shame he didn't write more of his own starring vehicles.

Because this guy...is pissed. And it shows.

Invasion U.S.A. is brutal and remorseless, but not in that wink-wink/nudge-nudge, one-man-army-movie kind of way. While it is fun (this thing must've provided a neutron-bomb-sized adrenaline rush to audiences during its initial release), really, it's the passage of time that's transformed Invasion U.S.A. from a mid-'80s curiosity into an altogether different experience, heightened by thirty years of changing sensibilities and evolving diplomatic relations.

Very much like the John Wick of its time, the plot of Invasion U.S.A. is built upon a very shaky and somewhat silly premise, and headlined by an automaton-like killing machine who appears to feel no empathy at all for his victims; both films even suggest that it was the death of a pet which spurred our heroes into action. But while both films are certainly fun, they're also taking their silly concepts 100% seriously. The viciousness in Invasion U.S.A. is far less Demolition Man and far more Out for Justice—the kind of violence that triggers revulsion rather than rejuvenation. Cocks are shot off, cocaine chutes are jammed up prostitutes' noses, men bleeding out on the ground are unceremoniously shredded by uzis, and adolescent refugees are shot down with automatic weapons. With that breakdown being a combination of efforts by both the hero and the villain, one might notice that their shared sadistic nature progresses toward blurring that line which separates the natures of good and evil. And that's perfect, because action films seldom do that.

Obvious action traditions aside, Invasion U.S.A. also feels like one of the most interesting and unorthodox horror films probably ever made. And all the credit in the world goes to director Zito for this aesthetic, being that he is the same man who birthed upon the horror-loving audience two paramount titles in the slasher flick sub-genre: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter and its twin-sister, The Prowler.

Invasion U.S.A. is Friday the 13th: Hunter's Revenge. The decimation of mankind at Matt Hunter's hands isn't lighthearted and it's not done for kicks. This isn't Arnold throwing knives into some dude's chest and telling him to "stick around" with a wink and a smile. This isn't Carl Weathers asking, "How do you like your ribs?" before destroying someone with a flamethrower. This is Chuck Norris sadistically killing legions of men while offering "puns" tantamount to "I am about to take your life the fuck away from you" or "Your final moments will be spent looking into the eyes of the man who snuffed the last breath from your pitiless body" ...or sometimes saying nothing at all. Like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, Matt Hunter is the masked maniac popping up from an impossible nowhere to separate a man's life from his chi, his beard acting as his mask, his open denim shirt serving as his gnarled highway of an exposed spine. And every invading guerrilla terrorist is the promiscuous teenager, or the big-mouthed town local, or the hapless cop who unknowingly steps into the maniac's rage-filled path. A commie firing a bazooka at a Christmas tree becomes indistinguishable from a nubile teen peeling off her gigantic '80s tennis sweater and demanding that her boyfriend enter her immediately, but only after they've pitched-tent a mile into the woods of Camp Crystal Lake or forced open the back door of an abandoned house in the town of Haddonfield, Illinois. The camera no longer follows along with the hero and watches, from his point of view, as he dispatches all the underlings sent his way. That feeling of alarm the audience might feel for the hero has instead been replaced by an unmistakably scare-tinged inevitability that henchman #37 is toast—not if, but when, and definitely how. This time, the camera stays with those underlings, or even the main baddie, as they maneuver slowly around corners and through dark alleys. Only then will Hunter pop up, double-gripping 9mm Micro Uzis, leaving the audience startled as they wonder the same last thought that also bubbled to the surface in the minds of Hunter's soon-to-be-victims: "Where the hell did he come fr—?" Much like every infamous masked movie maniac you can conjure, Matt Hunter takes lives with an array of different weapons, starting with his automatics, continuing with confiscated explosives, and ending with two already incredibly deadly weapons merged to become one—because it's in his nature, because it's his namesake, and because, despite his anthropomorphic shape, he bares nothing in common with humankind.

Between Norris' writing and Zito's direction, there are incredibly strong connotations pertaining to a pro-far-right ideology, and with this film being released at the height of Reaganism (a time during which two emphatic lessons were taught: be afraid of Russia, and buy lots of shit), that's not surprising. If we're allowed to delve deeply into the genetic code of Invasion U.S.A. (and maybe we shouldn't), the implication on display here is amusing both from an ironic standpoint, but also kind of a thematic one, though recklessly simplified: should the Reagan capitalist era ever result in America's potential evisceration, we, the people, won't have the ability or tenacity to help ourselves. We'll be shot down in shopping malls and during outdoor fiestas. We won't be able to trust cops (topical!) or the coast guard or the army, because the enemy will be wearing their uniforms. We won't even be safe placing the star at the top of our Christmas tree. Our only hope will be one man—a man who lost his identity working for the government, and who now lives out in the middle of nowhere, away from anything close to civilization, subsisting on a diet of fried frogs, with an adorable armadillo and a fellow gator-wrangling partner, John Eagle, his only companions. That is who will save us: the man who renounces everything about our America except when it comes to eliminating the motherfuckers trying to take her over.

But Invasion U.S.A. doesn't need just big, dumb, and on-the-nose tactics to be pro-America. It ably circumvents not-so-subtle approaches and fills its smaller moments with additional overly patriotic sentiments, some so mundane they could be understandably overshadowed. In the film's first introduction to Matt Hunter, he chides his friend John Eagle for working under the table while collecting social security, snidely suggesting that the IRS wouldn't care for that. The first appearance of McGuire, the news reporter character (Melissa Prophet), has her railing against government officials attempting to censor her journalistic rights "as protected by the First Amendment," at which one of those same officials only wryly smiles, the inevitable Patriot Act—something you just know our government had been wanting to establish for a long time—a tiny seed in his mind. In a scene where Rostov sits out in plain view at an outdoor bar as patrons loudly discuss the ensuing invasion, he overhears someone blame it on the amount of immigrants coming to America, remarking, "It was only a matter of time before it happened here," even as the enemy sits immediately among them wearing Florida whites. And in the shopping mall sequence where Hunter eventually battles a group of henchmen, which in retrospect comes off sillier than The Blues Brothers, a well-meaning shopper notices a plain-clothes terrorist leave behind a shopping bag (a hidden explosive) and goes to absurd lengths, even as the terrorist begins full-on sprinting the hell away from him—even as a security guard begins to pursue the fleeing man, signifying that something is clearly wrong—all to make sure the man gets back the package he'd "accidentally" left behind, because god damn it, Americans are good people.

That Rostov's attack takes place during Christmastime isn't attempting to homage certain action expectations, being that the yuletide-infused Lethal Weapon and Die Hard wouldn't be released, respectively, for another two and three years. It was less about having a superfluous setting and more about hammering home the idea that the communist Mikhail and his guerrillas weren't just invading American shores, but were attacking American values. In this two-minute attack sequence, our antagonists manage to enact the basic tenets of communism by disbanding the family unit, denouncing consumerism, and destroying religion, all committed simultaneously with a single shot, and by one flatbed truck filled with pissed-off terrorists in leather jackets. Firing a rocket launcher through an outdoor Christmas tree and into a house where a family is lovingly bickering over decorations surpasses all forms of subtlety, but look no further than how this attack-on-Christmas sequence ends: with the terrorists packing up their rocket launchers and getting the hell out of there, while Zito lets the camera linger on the aftermath. Families tear out of homes screaming in fear, kids are crying and running down the street; everyone is attempting to reassemble and make sure father, mother, sister, brother—the nuclear family—are present and accounted for. The bad guys are gone, so the scene should be over—the film should be moving on to the next set-piece—but Zito isn't letting his terrorized Floridian families off the hook that easily, all the while pulling the rug out from under his audience's feet; they'd just enjoyed a silly scene of silly movie carnage, but now he's forcing them to endure the ramifications of its consequences. He captures every cry and every flee of terror. Zito pulled a similar trick in his Friday the 13th: an overhead shot where all the bodies from Jason Voorhees' latest night-time massacre are packed up into ambulances and carted away, with the police cars and helicopters following close behind, their flashing blue lights and chopping rotors leaving Crystal Lake bathed in darkness and eerie quiet. In Friday, this beautiful shot conveys how quickly a setting of such madness and violence could go quiet in seconds, as if nothing ever happened—something to be swept under the rug by bureaucrats and forced-forgotten by Crystal Lake citizens until it happens again (which it will). Though Zito captures the same aftermath of an attack in his Invasion U.S.A., it's for different reasons, and with a far less subtle point: to hammer home the knowledge that not only can this happen—and that it will, and quite easily—but when it does, it's going to be really really really bad.

In typical Cannon Films fashion, a sequel to Invasion U.S.A. called "Night Hunter" was planned, and a poster was printed that promised Chuck Norris would return as the titular hunter. Sadly, this sequel's iteration never became more than a poster, as Norris declined to participate. The script was slightly reworked (though maintaining the character of Matt Hunter) and soon became Avenging Force, starring Michael Dudikoff of the American Ninja series—interestingly, the same series which had originally been a potential starring vehicle for Chuck Norris. That unmistakable waft of disappointment you may be feeling—"what could have been?"—lasts only so long, for though Avenging Force is its own kind of ridiculous, gone was the hard-edged approach and the anger (as well as director Zito, replaced by American Ninja helmer Sam Firstenberg). In its place was the lighter silliness Cannon Films had pretty much patented by that point in the late '80s. Seeing Norris return in a potential Matt Hunter franchise will always be the stuff of dreams, for his involvement in a sequel to a film that he wrote might have inspired more of the same—more inhuman heroes, more unflinching pain, more bloodthirsty patriotism, more rocket-sized erections for these United States.

In this column that celebrates the kind of action films now extinct, a paradox has manifested, in that even when these celebrated films were being made, none of them looked anything like Invasion U.S.A.: villains didn't have nightmares of the hero, the hero didn't lack humanity while severely diminishing the populace, the potential love interest wasn't reduced to a chick hurling a metal trashcan lid at the hero's head as he walked away from her in outright dismissal. Invasion U.S.A. exists in a tiny tiny class by itself, one in which the hero is clearly suffering a detachment from reality, and who kills just as many people as an army of bad guys do, but whose efforts are supported by the same audience preconditioned to accept that Chuck Norris is an American hero.

THE "GOOD" GUY

Matt Hunter. Gator wrangler. Air boat driver. Denim lover. Unwavering patriot. Open-shirt sporter. Diner check stiffer. Sci-fi fan. Armadillo owner. Former armadillo owner. Fried frog enthusiast. Completely out of his goddamned mind.

Some factions of the internet might be surprised to hear that Chuck Norris was actually pretty famous before a bunch of armchair comedians made up some "facts" about him and plastered them on t-shirts from Red Bubble. Shocking though it may be, it's true—not just because he became an action hero icon during the 1980s and followed that into the 1990s, but also because he was an accomplished black-belt in karate and sparred with none other than Bruce Lee in both real life as well as the feature film The Way of the Dragon...where Chuck played the villain(!). Norris being reimagined by millennials as a pop culture curiosity with godlike powers was mildly amusing until the realization set in that this sudden idol worship was likely and solely spawned by his long-running television show Walker, Texas Ranger, which didn't exemplify Norris at his best, along with the vague awareness that, yeah, at some point he had done a couple action films like those other guys Stallone and Van Damme. Ironically, even though it's claimed by IMDB (so let's believe it!) that Invasion U.S.A. is the second most popular-selling video unit in MGM's history behind only Gone with the Wind, it's this very film that many current audiences haven't seen where Norris does seem to exhibit those same inexplicable godlike powers that have since become celebrated. Though in recent years Norris hasn't really gone out of his way to discuss any of his previous film work, having spent most of his post-Hollywood life talking about Jesus and exercise equipment, it wouldn't be surprising to uncover that Chuck doesn't like to discuss Invasion U.S.A. because he probably looks back on it as that movie where he went too far. Even to the most hardened action fan, such a defamation wouldn't exactly sound nuts. Invasion U.S.A. isn't just thrilling or brutal or exceptionally violent, but it can, at times, feel a little dangerous, as if everyone involved in the production, from the screenwriters to the director to the actors, were furious about the state of international affairs, and fearful that the most bloated and cartoonishly overstated boogeyman of all time—communism—might breach American shores and infect its citizens with the notion that cutting someone's throat for that extra buck might, in fact, be a bad idea.

Speaking of furious, Chuck Norris' Matt Hunter is out of his mind, an unsmiling, unfeeling, unfazed killing machine. In one scene, he's saddened and infuriated to see that a carnival filled with families and children has been wiped out by the terrorists with no one surviving; in the next scene, he's on a motel bed smiling widely at a cheesy movie featuring UFOs. Sure, he may be the "hero" in the sense that a bunch of "bad guys" invade and Hunter sends them packing...to the tomb—the audience demands this and Norris delivers—but there are times when you actually start to feel a little bad for all the soldiers for whom Chuck books one-way tickets to hell via passage down fiery, thousand-foot razor-blade slides, the flames crawling across the hapless soldiers finally extinguished only after they drown in their destined oceans of vomit. Dying at Matt Hunter's hands is to not only die slowly and painfully, but it's to die with utter shame. It's to die knowing that your entire life spent believing you were a man was ousted as a lie in your final moments while the blackness rolled over your eyes.

Chuck has gone kind of crazy-conservative over the years, spurred into especial craziness during the Obama years (he warned of "1,000 years of darkness" if he won his 2012 re-election), and while it's always best to separate the man from the myth, his politically conservative views force you to reevaluate many of the films that he made during the most transformative time in modern America. Upon doing so, you'll realize that, say, in films like Invasion U.S.A., Chuck not only loves America, but he will balls-out lose his fucking mind and embrace his inner Ted Bundy by way of the T-800 and obliterate anyone who dares soil her purple mountain majesty. In much the same way that a writer inadvertently, even if minutely, inserts his inner-self into every character or conflict he creates, the actor infuses his inner-self into every character he plays. Would it be absurd to suggest that Chuck Norris, actor and co-writer who once acted under the stage name Chuck Slaughter, under his big-grin surface, is an unfeeling, remorseless killing machine? Of course it would, let's not shit ourselves. But would we be remiss in refusing to consider that maybe Chuck Norris might be just the least bit...off?

Only time will tell.

THE BAD GUY

Mikhail Rostov. Communist. Dedicated castrator. Cuban refugees assassinator. America hater. Christmas destroyer. Recurrent nightmare sufferer. TV smasher. Ultimate anti-drug spokesman.

Richard Lynch has played the villain for nearly all of his life, beginning with 1973's Scarecrow and ending with 2012's The Lords of Salem. (The actor died that same year.) Lynch has always managed to exude a sinister appearance, but it was an incident that occurred in 1976, at the height of the psychedelic drug craze, that forever changed his life. (What's commonly known is that after dosing himself with LSD, he inexplicably set himself on fire, but what has never been substantiated is the legend that Lynch purposely set himself on fire to kill the bugs he'd been hallucinating were crawling all over his body.) Following a period of facial reconstruction surgery and emotional recuperation, Lynch finally got up the confidence to seek other roles, only his unusual appearance would ensure that he played either the villainous, or the untrustworthy and unlikeable, for the rest of his career. Modestly, and appropriately, he would also become an impassioned anti-drug advocate, using his own tragedy to personify what can happen to someone with a bright and promising future when messing around with that d-word stuff.

With Mikhail Rostov, Lynch presents the most fascinating and nuanced of all the villains to be featured in TTMM. There's no lacking of the dastardly and the maniacal here, that's for sure, but there's another side to Rostov that is actually pretty refreshing in this genre, and it's this: Lynch's Rostov is openly afraid of the hero. And yeah, one might argue that every villain is afraid of the hero on some silent subconscious level, but for Rostov, it's really not necessary to go that deep down the rabbit hole. The audience knows Rostov is afraid of Matt Hunter because they've already seen the nightmare he's had about him—and not just one nightmare, but several. Recurring. And they all conclude the same way: with Hunter kicking Rostov square in the face haha. Think about this for a second: Rostov is not only so terrified of Hunter that he's suffering nightmares about him, but these nightmares end with him only being physically harmed. He's not being caught and slowly tortured to death, or looking down the barrel of Matt Hunter's gun and awaiting an inevitable execution. On a fear scale of one through ten, with ten being "completely petrified," Rostov being kicked in the face ranks a fully engorged seventeen. THAT'S how scared he is, so much that he awakes from every nightmare bathed in cold sweat and shaking. So much that his cohorts burst into his room and ask, "The dream again?" And Rostov corrects them: "The nightmare."

From an actor's standpoint, that's a pretty ballsy approach to a character—especially the villain, and especially in this genre. An action director will tell you that many concessions have to be made when it comes to presenting any one or several action heroes. Forget the fact that it's all fiction, and that no audience member in his or her right mind should be taking the images and depictions on screen seriously: at no time can one action star look more manly, or fearless, or intelligent than the other. Fight scenes are choreographed so that, even if it's inevitable one of them must lose, both men come out looking strong and capable. This was and continues to be the mindset. Action stars take this away from movie sets like baggage, paranoid that their fans will look upon them with disapproval in real life because they lost a fight in a movie. When it came time for Lynch's interpretation of the character on the page, he not only embraced this unheard of approach to a villain, but he brought to the role a real sense of phobia and vulnerability. He willingly became afraid of the hero, instead of exhibiting that faux macho bravado spurred either by sociopathy or narcissism that's become so common among celluloid villains. Lynch was a smarter actor for having embarked on such a direction, knowing that even if he was going to be taking on a more typical villain, he was going to play him in such a way that the bad guy contained multiple layers beyond merely being "the bad guy."

THE CASUALTIES

The Bad Guys

John Eagle gets the honor of the first couple bad-guy kills, blowing away two dudes with a shotgun. One bad guy is mowed down by Hunter's gigantic American bronco. Three shopping-mall invaders are cut in half with 9mm Micro Uzis. One terrorist crashes and explodes in a stolen pick-up truck. Three terrorists masquerading as American soldiers are shot full of lead. Four guys are blown up by their own suitcase bomb. Five more fake soldiers are shot down by an assault rifle. Nikko the henchman is shot directly in the face by his own held gun. Three more guys are blown to smithereens with their own explosive. One helicopter pilot is blown up by a rocket launcher. Four guys are shot by double Micro Uzis. Two guys are shotgunned in half—through the wall. One guy's belly meets a knife...very quickly. All told, 32 commie bastards bleed red, turn white, and rot until blue.

The Good Guys

A group of stranded Cubans, numbering somewhere around a dozen, are mowed down by an array of gunfire. One coked-out dame gets a cocaine chute jammed into her brain and then thrown out a window. One would-be drug dealer gets his manhood shot off at point blank range. Two drug-dealer body guards get shot in the chest. John Eagle takes an assault rifle spray to the body. Two randy beach-going teens are executed in the head and the ambiguous. One Christmas tree is blown to bits, along with the family who owns it. Really, one entire block of houses gets blown to Christmas cheer. Four Cuban party goers are executed with shotguns. Three mall shoppers are shot down while two explode from a Christmas present bomb. Another guy gets his manhood shot off at point-blank range. Two butchers (?) get mowed down by gunfire. An unknown number of children—children!—perish in an off-screen carnival attack. Two rent-a-cops get blown to hell. One armadillo succumbs to complications from an exploding swamp house.

All in all, the bad guys actually kill more people (36 confirmed) than the good guys*, and that rarely happens. Invasion My Heart!

*The final battle sequence between the U.S. military and Rostov's soldiers is ridiculous non-stop carnage and difficult to analyze for kill counts. Simply put: both sides win/lose in equal measures.

THE BEST KILL

A group of terrorist soldiers rig explosives inside a suitcase and leave it outside the main entrance of a church. The terrorists reconvene in the alley at their mini control center. The lever makes its appearance; the switch is thrown.

No explosion.

Above them on the roof of the building, Hunter appears, complete with triumphant musical sting, impossibly holding the suitcase filled with the church steps' explosives at which the terrorists hadn't stopped looking. Hunter watches without amusement as the men hit the unresponsive switch over and over.

"Not working, huh?" he asks. He tosses the suitcase of explosives down at their feet, his eyes hardened with pure insanity as he touches together the ends of the two trigger wires. "Now it will."

Cue explosion—and mangasm.

THE DAMAGE

That little trickle of blood on Hunter's head?

That's about the size of it.

THE BAD GUY'S COMEUPPANCE

Following the extended finale in which Rostov creeps around an abandoned office building with a rocket launcher perched on his shoulder, Hunter makes his presence known, seemingly materializing out of nowhere like the fucking Phantom of the Opera, and steps up beside him. He unleashes his own rocket launcher, aimed at waist level, and seethes: "It's...time." Rostov growls in fury, turns to take his shot...and gets blown into a spray of blood, bones, belly jelly, heads, and one single foot-filled boot...all in different directions. It's not only the end of Rostov, but it's the end of the film. No character wrap-up, no final moments of relief or levity. Man explodes; black unfolds; credits roll.

You rule so hard, Invasion U.S.A.

THE LINE

So, so, so many good lines in this. One cannot stand to represent all; it's simply unfair.

"If you come back in here, I'm going to hit you with so many rights, you're going to beg for a left."

"You're beginning to irritate me."

"Not working, huh? Now it will."

(sticking a bomb onto a truck of terrorists) "Did you lose this?"

And, of course:

"It's...time."

THE VERDICT

Invasion U.S.A., while a wildly entertaining, bizarre, hardcore, and somewhat disturbing experience, is the black sheep of Chuck Norris' career. Long known for being "the good guy" in the sense that he mostly spent his career seeking reparations from war criminals, going on search-and-rescue missions for fellow soldiers, or reducing the worthlessness of asthmatic children (RIP Jonathan Brandis), Invasion U.S.A. is the film in which Chuck Norris full-on embraced his murderous persona. Perhaps inspired by the balls-to-the-wall direction in which the First Blood series seemed to be headed (though it was critical of America's involvement in the Vietnam War), Norris, too, designed a film to not only exemplify his skill for taking lives, but to also really cram down your throat that he fucking loves America, who is perfect just the way she is, and for whom NO ONE is going to cause strife...not on his watch.