Yesterday I wrote about a real stinker, a little no budget affair titled THE ANNIHILATORS. That was a case of revisiting a decades old VHS viewing and discovering that nostalgia is a harsh mistress. Now, the exact opposite. A movie that I find more enjoyable now than I did even as a kid with admittedly low standards.
Okay, a little preface if you will. The heart of the matter. I love B movies. Adore them when they get it right. All too often, they misfire, but when you get that rare convergence of ideas and execution, you can get something wonderful: The Pure B Movie. That's what we have here, folks, with today's feature. Unfortunately, the Pure B Movie doesn't happen that often in this day and age because the tropes and formulas of movies are all too familiar to audiences, and too often filmmakers rely on deconstruction and meta commentary to tell their stories. Which then cease to become stories in my opinion. What are the next generation of filmmakers supposed to take as inspiration, and at what point does it all just become too cute and implode on itself?
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| Exhibit RR |
Don't get me wrong, when that sort of thing works, ala Quentin Tarantino and the incomparable INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, it's not only good, it's transcendent. That is the exception, though. More often than not we are left with forgettable entries such as SHOOT 'EM UP. I do realize that the idea of "movies about movies" has been around for the longest time, all the way back to the beautiful westerns of Leone, the astounding achievements of mood and atmosphere of Melville, and I'm sure well before these two examples. That's a whole other bag of donuts, though, as those artists were usually reinterpreting the American films that influenced them in the first place.
I need to make something clear right now. I am in no way saying that my idea of the pure B movie can have nothing on its mind. Hell no, the genres that were historically relegated to the ranks of B status were terrific vessels to smuggle in ideas on everything from sexuality, politics, rampant consumerism, and anything else that was on the film maker's mind.
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| Don't turn the channel yet, Chuck |
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089348/
Wow, don't be such a dick. I'm getting to that. INVASION U.S.A. is today's example of a Pure B Movie. There is no winking here. It's a straight forward action picture that is put together by an ace craftsman, the unsung Joseph Zito (Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, The Prowler). While the only ideas smuggled in are laughable Reagan era paranoid fantasies, the movie delivers on all of its intentions.
The movie begins with a boatload of refuges, it's never explicitly stated, but presumably trying to get from Cuba to Florida. I've been to Florida, and I'm not sure it's really much of an improvement. Another boat is spotted, and it looks like it's good news, a Coast Guard crew led by none other than Richard Lynch.
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| If you can't trust this face, then who can you trust? |
Except it's not good news. Lynch is actually Mikhail Rostov, leader of a group of, as the trailer puts it, international terrorists. After greeting the refuges with a warm welcome to the Estados Unidos, Lynch then directs his men to massacre the boat people with machine guns. At first I assumed it was because they had the gall to leave a paradise like Cuba, but instead the terrorists are after a stash of drugs on the boat.
Next we're introduced to Matt Hunter, played by Chuck Norris. He lives a spartan existence in the Florida Everglades, and earns a living by wrangling alligators for use on one of the fifty reality shows about idiots who live in swamps, also known as nature's asshole. He does this with his crusty old pal, John Eagle (Dehl Berti). Hunter doesn't really like John Eagle and really only tolerates him because he is a shaman that can summon the spirits of hot women. These spirits provide Hunter with sexual pleasure, since no woman in her right mind would venture to a swamp. I mean, there's fucking gators there, and all kinds of creepy crawly shit. Probably things they haven't even discovered yet.
Back to Rostov and his shenanigans. Rostov plans to sell the drugs (Cocainum!) for arms. No, not the things that hang off our shoulders, but guns, lots and lots of guns. In what is either a converted seedy hotel or the shabbiest office building ever, Rostov meets with none other than Sleazeball Hall of Famer Billy Drago.
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| Wild horses couldn't Drago me away |
Although the deal goes off without a hitch, Rostov decides to kill Drago and his lovely, butterfly knife wielding, cocaine snorting assistant Dorothy in nasty fashion. It seems that he hates Americans and their decadent ways so much, that he cannot control his violent impulses. Dorothy's end starts out particularly gruesome, in fact, I defy anybody with a nose not to flinch. Note to self: Don't ever do cocaine around Richard Lynch. Rostov then reveals his nasty little trademark, shoving his pistol down his enemy's pants and firing. This whole scene is indicative of the movie's nasty, sweaty little charm.
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| Why, Rostov, why? |
Now back to Matt Hunter, not to be confused with Matt Hunter, as played by Michael Dudikoff in Cannon's AVENGING FORCE. Hunter's only real friend is his pet armadillo, Tom. There's a heart warming scene where Hunter is chopping trees down with his chainsaw, mainly because he suddenly realized that he's living in a fucking swamp and that he has wasted his life to this point. He is distraught, but witnessing the shenanigans of lil' Tom puts a smile on his face and makes everything right in the world again.
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That's what it's all about. |
You see, it turns out that Hunter and Rostov have a connection. A bad breakup in the summer of '74 led to lifelong animosity between the two. They should have known that it would never workout, what with Hunter being some sort of government trained badass ("The company really needs you this time"- actual line of dialogue), and Rostov being an in demand international terrorist, always on the go. It doesn't help matters that a still bitter Hunter likes to show up and fuck with Rostov on the job, such as kicking him in the face right before he blows up a room full of people with a rocket launcher. Rostov clearly still has feelings of his own, as we see the just mentioned scene in one of his many dreams featuring Hunter.
There are a few other characters that pop in and out of the story, including a reporter played by Melissa Prophet (Action Jackson, Goodfellas). Her only function in the movie is to A: Show up and get put in jeopardy in order for Hunter to save her and B: Show up at the end and call Hunter "Cowboy", because that's the sort of thing Chuck Norris puts in his scripts. In fact, it was at one time a contractual obligation that Norris must be addressed as Cowboy at least once every ten pages.
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The titular invasion is pretty weak, as far as invasions go. There's a scene that looks like a couple hundred dudes storming some beach in Florida. To be fair to the movie, there are radio reports heard along the way that indicate that terror is happening all over the country. Which is good, because I'm not really sure the rest of the country would really mind somebody taking Florida off of our hands. The evil plan, as far as I can gather, is about spreading fear and chaos with random terrorist attacks. That's about as far as we get with the actual invasion, other than the final, which I'll talk about in a bit.
Now it's up to Hunter to put a stop to all this nonsense. His plan is driving around in his truck and using his supernatural abilities to be in the exact right place and right time a terrorist attack is going down. Might sound like a bad plan, but holy shit, it works! Terrorists attaching a bomb to random school bus on the road? You bet, Hunter is right there. Terrorists planting a bomb in a crowded shopping mall? Fuck, Yeah, Hunter is on the case.
The rest of the movie is moments like this, Hunter stopping the terrorists activity, with Rostov getting more and more pissed until he finally decides to use all of his small army to storm downtown and take out Hunter, who has been arrested for his anti terror crusade. Classic hothead Rostov. You see, Hunter has not really been arrested, it was all a ruse in order to get the possibly retarded Rostov to commit all his men to one two block radius so that they could easily be taken out by armed forces, who have finally come back from their weekend trip to Cedar Point in beautiful Sandusky, Ohio.
Sounds like I didn't like the movie, right? After all that laudatory bullshit at the beginning? I know it's a ridiculous movie. I'm not blind or deaf or THAT stupid. But do I like it just because it's silly? No, I genuinely enjoy it in all its pure B glory. It would make a great double feature with RED DAWN. Both are concerned with ludicrous invasions on American soil. Unlike Red Dawn, though, the movie never explicitly states where these invaders are coming from. It's all sort of vague, and you're left to assume, what with the bad guy being named Rostov, that it's a Soviet funded operation perhaps launching from Cuba. Invasion was co written by Chuck, with James Bruner, so it possibly gives a glimpse of the right wing fears that were going through his head at the time. The 80's were weird, man, and kind of scary. Still had the Cold War and the constant threat of nuclear doomsday on our minds, and it's reflected in schlock like this.
Invasion is also the distillation of everything there is to possibly like about Chuck Norris as an action hero. Which, admittedly, isn't much. Thankfully Chuck doesn't saddle himself with that much dialogue. It's a hard lesson learned from shit like The Octagon and Forced Vengeance, when the filmmakers decided to give the guy with the least interesting vocal delivery of all time voice over narration.
The movie shines in the action department, though. It's all well staged, and get this, you can tell what's going on in the action scenes. It probably sounds crazy to any youngsters out there raised on the action movies of the 90's and this new century, but there was a time when you had an idea of where each character was in relation to the other, and fist fights weren't filmed in EXTREME close up. For once, the movie poster didn't lie. Chuck firing two Uzis at once? It's actually in the movie!
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| Fuck Yeah |
Love it. It's really hard to explain why I like this movie as much as I do. It's just one of those that hits the sweet spot for me.
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| Scorpio would be proud. |
Check this out:
http://www.indiegogo.com/indycinemanation?a=697844
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