Rating: 
Summary: A provocative, historically significant classic
Review: Invasion USA is essentially the grand-daddy of all nuclear war movies, a remarkable film released in 1953 that almost certainly proved frightening to movie audiences of that era. Nowadays, the film exudes an aura of campiness and, depending on one's political viewpoint, draws either laughs or respect (and sometimes both). Invasion USA is definitely a Cold Warriors movie, an unforgettable piece of cinematic propaganda that turned its spotlights clearly on the threat of the Red menace. Making liberal use of stock footage from World War II, this movie not only offers a vision of Communist invasion but explains why such an invasion might succeed, thus rallying the American people not to retreat into post-war isolationism and materialism. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and this is the message Invasion USA conveyed rather impressively.I happen to think this movie is brilliant. I was born in 1970, and I knew the fear of nuclear war as a child. For those living in the 1950s, the fear of nuclear was an even more pervasive threat - as was Communism. I still hate Communism with every fiber of my being, and for me personally the Cold War will not end until the number of Communists in the world falls all the way to zero. The generation coming of age today does not truly know the gnawingly pervasive threat of intercontinental nuclear war nor do today's youth remember a world in which the USSR not only existed but cast dark shadows across many parts of the world. To many today, the Red Scare conjures up comical images of a fanatical Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society looking for Communists under rocks and park benches. Invasion USA will thus strike many viewers today as rather silly, but I regard this as, to some degree, an educational film that offers an insightful look into the American mind of the 1950s. Certainly, the characters are rather two-dimensional, the dialogue is unintentionally funny on several occasions, and the ending is likely to produce a few groans among modern audiences, but the film's theme and message is not only historically informative but still, in the broadest sense, relevant and instructive. The setup and "kicker" plot twist at the end may well leave one with a bad taste in his/her mouth initially, but Invasion USA is still capable of resonating over time in the minds of those who see it. It is really an unusual film in more ways than one. Not only does it offer a frightening vision of America subjugated by an unnamed yet ruthless and easily identifiable enemy, it assigns the blame for this possible future defeat on a populace of men and women too concerned with their own lives and desires to look out for the interests of the nation. One of the characters in the film, for example, is a wealthy tractor manufacturer who just turned down a government request to produce needed military tanks, putting profit above patriotism. Complacency and the voluntary wearing of blinders among a population sick of world wars is shown to be the weakest link in America's contemporary defense. Everybody complains about taxes, concentrates solely on their own needs, and goes about his/her life pretending that America could never possibly be attacked - script writer Robert Smith clearly communicated the dangerous vulnerability implicit in such a worldview. Invasion USA is a clarion call to a prosperous people courting danger by avoiding a frightening truth. The film was amazingly effective in delivering this crucial and timely warning to its audience. The same message applies in our own world; while the threat comes from a different source, only a vigilant and cooperative attitude among the American people can safeguard our freedoms from those who wish to destroy us. Clearly, Invasion USA was a success, one which soon led to similar films built around the horrifying threat of nuclear war. The movie earned more than one million dollars - not too shabby for a film shot in the course of only seven days on a budget of one hundred twenty seven thousand dollars. Stock footage from World War II makes up some 30% of the film. Fictional news broadcasts explaining the progress (or, more correctly, lack of progress) in the war leave room for only so much actual human interaction and dialogue - this is perhaps fortunate, as the characters are less than captivating in and of themselves. Still, there is enough of a personal dimension to the tragedy unleashed on film to really bring Invasion USA's message across to the sympathetic viewer. It's impossible not to laugh at parts of this movie all these decades later, but there is an eternally valuable message - exaggerated as it may be - here that all freedom-loving men and women would do well to ponder over.
Rating: 
Summary: Mindless shooting...typical Chuck Norris stuff
Review: This movie is basically what you get in any Chuck Norris film - big guns, a lot of things getting blown up, and a lot of people getting shot. If that's what you want, then that's basically all you'll get. Of course, it's basically plotless; Chuck plays an ex-CIA guy whose home gets blown up by a crazy <Russian> terrorist. This same terrorist is also launching a full-scale invasion of the United States, and his men all land on the Florida coast in landing craft with lots of automatic weapons and rockets. (There are thousands of these guys, by the way. How he got that many men and weapons continues to baffle me). When they're invading the country, they try to blow up all sorts of things...malls, churches, school buses, and people's homes. Magically, Chuck always seems to appear whenever they're about to destroy something, and he hurls their own explosives back at them and kills them. (How he always seems to know where they'll strike and when is also beyond me.) Of course, he does shoot a lot of stuff with guns and rocket launchers captured from the bad guys. No matter how outnumbered he is in any given situation, he always seems to get the job done without taking one bullet. The end, though, is really cool, when he gets the U.S. Army to help him lure the terrorists (all the thousands of them) into the UN Plaza in New York. The Army, armed with vastly greater firepower (tanks, helicopters, etc.) lays waste to the hordes of terrorists, and there's so much going on that it's a lot of fun to watch. Oh, yeah, and I watched this movie with a friend who knows a bit of stuff on military weaponry, and he pointed out all sorts of inconsistencies with the guns in the movies, including the rocket launchers that can blow up whole houses in some scenes, but which don't do any damage to Chuck when he fires them at bad guys in narrow corridors from less than five feet away. All in all, this movie is pretty bad, and I recommend it strictly for the brainless action fan who desires nothing more than to just watch a lot of people get killed by Chuck and his guns. Don't expect anything else at all.
Rating: 
Summary: Bad, bad, bad. Chuck you can do better than this!
Review: This movie was, in a word-"goofball." However I do own it and my friends and I get a kick out of watching it now and then. This one, like Lone Wolf Mcquade stretches your believability meter to the limit, but this one will surely break it-gauranteed. Chuck is always in the right place at the right time when the perps are doing a number and pulls off one unbelievable stunt after another. The only difference between this and the other Chuck classics is that the bad guys acting is as wooden as his. Rent it first.
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