KYMM'S 365 DAY MOVIE CHALLENGE #44: INVASION USA (1985, dir by Joseph Zito, USA)

“If you come back in here, I’m going to hit you with so many rights, you’ll be begging for a left.”

I have never used these posts to review films that I actually see at Secret Movie Club, but today that tradition changes, because this was a very particular movie experience.

Edwin, a staff member at SMC, got to program a movie for his birthday, and that movie was Invasion USA, a Chuck Norris film about one lone man saving America from a Russian invasion. Now I, being a girl-type person, had never seen a Chuck Norris movie ever before, mostly because it never even once crossed my mind to do so. I’m sure there are people out there who go see Chuck Norris films, (see: Edwin), but I am not one of them. My father did an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger in 1994 that I vaguely remember watching at the time, but that is it.

Chuck Norris is a person who exists on the planet earth, he is a black belt in everything, and we are 100% opposite sides on every political issue at all ever. This is all I know about Chuck Norris.

Invasion USA is a film filled with terrible actors and, briefly, Billy Drago, (who is not actually a good actor, but is at least interesting), who were free that day and could appear in this movie. It has a really awful script, and the Lone Female Character, the Smurfette, a journalist poorly played by Melissa Prophet, who never even once appears to be doing anything journalistically but taking pictures for stories that do not exist, is not a love interest and isn’t really anything and then just kind of disappears and we don’t even notice because the boys have to shoot at each other forever.

For some reason, the main baddie, who we know is Russian because his name is Mikhael Rostov, though not from his accent, yells “Mach schnell!” a lot at the invading troops, but maybe they are East German? Also evil commies who want to destroy the decadent West?

This film is so at sixes and sevens with itself that I’m only now realizing I have not described the plot, here in paragraph six! Though I kind of did it in paragraph one, in that Chuck Norris saves America. Okay, Hunter (our Chuck), is retired from… some kind of government thing like maybe the CIA, and lives happily in Florida. Rostov (Richard Lynch), is the bad bad man that Hunter failed to kill in the past (under orders), and has now come back to wreak all kinds of vengeance on the US by taking it over with a really quite small group of people. They were only so many extras that Golan/Globus were going to pay for, after all.

A government guy asks Hunter to come back and do something about the situation, but Hunter refuses. He is retired. America has made its bed and they can go lie in it. Rostov, on the other hand, is so paranoid about the fact that Hunter is alive and in the United States of America and will stop him, when he totally has to start this invasion in Florida, apparently. If Hunter is in Florida, why not take over the United States in Maine? Or Oregon? Why in Hunter’s literal backyard? Because there would be no movie? Okay, yeah, I guess that mystery’s solved.

Anyway, Rostov decides to go and blow up Hunter’s house, which he does, also killing his friend and wounding his tiny pet armadillo. I was very worried about that armadillo after the house blew up, but it’s okay, we see him limping away, partially blackened with soot. Hunter then runs off, leaving the tiny pet armadillo behind and never giving him another thought, so I don’t know about this guy. Yeah, I know, his friend was killed, but the armadillo was extremely cute!

Rostov, on the other hand, dusts off his hands and breaks his arm patting himself on the back for a job well done, and doesn’t check to see if Hunter was killed in the explosion, which, spoiler alert, he was not. So then Hunter goes back to the government guy and tell him that he will take the job as long as he can work on his own. So off he goes to save America.

So here’s the thing, I suppose you can tell from my somewhat sarcastic tone that this movie, as far as quality goes, is not so much what you would call good. On the other hand, it is totally fun and I loved it! Plot twist! This is true even considering the fact that I fell asleep at the end because the last 20 minutes are so boring, being nothing but bangity bang, shootity shoot and literally not a single other thing happens but that and it just put me to sleep.

So, terrible acting, poor script, boring climax, what has this movie got going for it? CHUCK NORRIS! He is, I am shocked to say, really good! He underplays in a way that makes him charismatic and winning, and nobody on God’s green earth would have predicted that. He throws away his lines in a way that makes sense for the character, but when he has to intensely look into a camera lens and tell Rostov he’s coming for him, he does it with style!I,

Kymm Zuckert, am now going to seek out and watch more Chuck Norris movies, thanks to Edwin and Secret Movie Club, which might be the weirdest thing to happen in all of 2021.

Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog