Invasion U.S.A. (1985)

Evil Soviet bad guy Mikhail Rostov (Richard Lynch) has an evil plan to finally bring down the Land of the Free™. He’s going to bring in a bunch of international people of evil, and have them start a mass of terrorist attacks, preferably staged in such a way the divergent social groups of the country will be set at each other’s throats and people will start to learn to distrust authority (gasp!). Alternatively, these attacks are set against Christmas trees, American flags, white little girls and shopping malls. Yup, that’s the titular invasion, even though it’s not actually an invasion in a classic Cannon manoeuvre.

The only thing Rostov fears is former CIA agent Matt Hunter (Chuck Norris). Hunter, you see, once nearly killed Rostov and only turned a deadly shot into a show-off martial artist kick because his higher-ups said so. Lucky for Rostov, Hunter has quit his job and is now living somewhere in the swamps of Florida, eating frogs and petting an armadillo, and even when asked to return to go after Rostov, he grumpily declines. Alas, Rostov’s Chuckophobia convinces him a preventive attack on our hero’s (oh gawd) home is the best way to go; of course, that only kills Hunter’s native American buddy (and possibly the armadillo), and makes the man righteously angry, which is to say induces mild muscular movement in his face and turns him into a torturing, murdering sadist now very pleased to hunt murdering, torturing sadist Rostov and his men down. What a patriot!

Cannon’s Invasion U.S.A. takes a particularly honoured place in the line-up of ultra-jingoistic US action movies of the 80s because it is raving so wildly it is at times difficult to discern if Joseph Zito’s film is in fact an expression of the right-wing frothing of its time or indeed a parody through hyperbole. Of course, given Chuck Norris’s well-known politics, and the fact he is actually listed as a screenwriter, it’s probably right-wing raving that accidentally turns into parody, even though I do find it rather improbable nobody involved realized that the film’s hero is a creepy sociopath who really, really loves to kill and torture people.

Part of the rather disturbing impression Norris makes here is the fault of the way the script writes around his flaws as an actor, namely, that he can’t emote at all, and that his delivery of any piece of dialogue longer than a one-liner is usually just wrong and often utterly bizarre. What choice is there than to make him a guy who has no friends, doesn’t actually talk to people (not even an “are you alright?” for innocent bystanders), and who prowls the nightly streets of your random South Eastern US city like a serial killer looking for prey? It doesn’t help that the Norris school (and its most horrifying brother, the Seagal school) of action heroics never lets its hero show weakness at all, so where JCVD or Lundgren, or even Michael Dudikoff (the future Matt Hunter, even though the characters share nothing beyond the South and a talent for violence) from time to time get a beat down or seem actually perturbed and aggravated by the violence around them, Norris just robotically and effortlessly murders his enemies.

On the positive side, Norris is the ideal opposite to Richard Lynch’s high-strung and weaselly performance, his often hilarious joy at destroying suburbs, school busses, and whatever else “typically American” making him easy to love (hate?), his every twitch turning him into the Anti-Norris. And yeah, I was sort of rooting for him to at least take Chuck with him.

Lynch isn’t the only one showing great enthusiasm for destruction though. Zito’s direction takes all the crassness, the stupidity, and the plain weirdness of the script and turns it into the one true kind of poetry action cinema knows, motion and explosions, using every editing trick, every suspense technique, and every loud noise in the book to create a real magnum opus of the stupidly overblown, on a Cannon budget. And while the film’s politics are dubious at best, and its lead actor isn’t up to snuff, Invasion U.S.A. is such an unapologetic bit of action cinema I can’t help but love it.

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In short: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

It seems as if this Halloween season, I’m going to slog through the less popular sequels of some of everyone’s favourite slasher franchises, just in case other blogs’ ways of keeping Halloween classy by concerning themselves with good horror movies is getting too much for you. Don’t be afraid, gentle reader, things will get better around here again once the great day has come and gone. Or before, depending on time, sanity, and the quality of slasher sequels.

Jason (this time embodied by one Ted White), wakes up in the morgue, kills a couple of people, and returns to his wood home to start a new cycle of slashing teenagers. You’d think the police would start to get how this thing works by now, particularly since Jason’s last two killing sprees were just a day or so past, but of course they’ll only appear to mop up the bodies.

Anyway, the fourth and not so very final Friday the 13th film is pretty much the same as the last ones, only where the first film codified a lot of elements of the slasher Halloween actually didn’t codify (and which Halloween 2 would later ape with little success), where the second one was really rather good and, and where the third one was entertainingly stupid, this one’s just boring. Sure, it’s less aggressively dumb than number three, but replaces that film’s high level stupidity with nothing remarkable at all, resulting in too many scenes of nothing happening until Jason finally kills someone.

However, the kills look and feel curiously perfunctory, with little on screen that seems actually transgressive, the oh-so-shocking on-screen violence feeling boring and not a little tepid, robbed of any context surrounding them as they are. Not one of the stalking scenes is actually suspenseful, and the film’s final girl sequence is lacking in imagination and punch, which has a lot to do with the fact that the film spent by far not enough time with our final girl of the night, Trish (Kimberly Beck), leaving her as the film’s final girl just because she’s the last one standing.

You might imagine that adding her special effects make-up loving kid brother Tommy (young Corey Feldman) to the mix would change things up a little, but Barney Cohen’s script only uses him for a – limp – rehash of an iconic scene from the second part.

The script is generally quite adept at wasting opportunities – there’s also a guy sneaking around hunting Jason, which again amounts to little of interest in the end. Really, the only opportunity the film doesn’t waste is showing us Crispin Glover’s dance moves.

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