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.
