We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
INVASION U.S.A. (1985)
There's so much debate over whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie (clearly it is, being set at Christmastime and having all sorts of references to the holiday), people seem to overlook how much of a viable alternative Lethal Weapon is when they're looking for a yuletide '80s action fix. Referenced even less often is director Joseph Zito's Invasion U.S.A., which is the darkest of the three movies I've just mentioned.
James Bruner crafted the story for this film with one Norris brother, Aaron Norris, then wrote the screenplay with another, Chuck Norris, who also happens to star in the film as retired CIA agent Matt Hunter. Hunter reluctantly returns to action when Mikhail Rostov (Richard Lynch), a Soviet operative who has history with him, starts leading an invasion of Communist guerrillas into the United States via the Florida coast. Rostov is so obsessed with making sure Hunter won't get in his way, it kind of distracts him from the invasion he's trying to pull off, and he's only successful in getting Hunter pissed off at him and extra determined to stop him.
The darkness of the film comes through the fact that we see, on multiple occasions, Rostov and/or the men he's leading murder innocent people in cold blood, including gunning down many Cuban refugees and expats, killing a couple on a beach, and destroying a suburban neighborhood. The sequence of suburban destruction gave me one of those cinematic "How did they do that?" moments, because we see the villains roll into this nice area that's all done up for Christmas, and proceed to blow up actual homes. This was shocking to me, because this was a Cannon Films release made on a budget of $12 million. How could they afford to blow up homes like that? As it turns out, this suburban area was slated for demolition anyway, because a nearby airport was expanding. I've seen something like this myself; I was on the set of The Strangers: Prey at Night, which was filmed in what had once been a residential area, but was bought out by a nearby airport. The houses were long gone by the time The Strangers and I got in there, though.
Another major sequence that cements this as a Christmas viewing option is set in a mall that's thoroughly decorated for the holiday. Hunter battles some villains inside this place, which was the Avondale Mall near Avondale Estates, Georgia and sadly no longer exists, and they make a mess of it.
I'm not the biggest fan of Invasion U.S.A., it's a bit too mean-spirited for my taste, but there is some cool action in there, and some violent moments where Zito brought in special effects legend Tom Savini, whom he had worked with on Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, to provide the bloodshed.
PSYCHOPATHS (2017)
Psychopaths feels like it was mainly just an excuse for director Mickey Keating and cinematographer Mac Fisken to do some visual experimentation. Visually, the film is terrific, Keating and Fisken captured some great imagery. But as a feature film that's attempting to tell some sort of story, the experience of sitting through its 82 minutes and trying to concentrate on it is not very satisfying.
The set-up is that the film shows us the wave of violence that sweeps across a city when a serial killer named Starkweather (Larry Fessenden) - but not the serial killer named Starkweather who existed in the real world and was executed in 1959 - is executed on the night of a full moon. The psychopaths of the title are played by the likes of Ashley Bell, James Landry Hebert, Angela Trimbur, and others... and the film is really just a bunch of violent vignettes that jump around in time and from place to place as we watch people do terrible things to each other. There aren't any characters to latch on to or care about, we're just drifting along. And that's why Psychopaths is tough to focus on, because there's no reason to care about what's happening. It's just violence and pretty pictures.
I'm always hearing about movies being shown on a loop in nightclubs, and Psychopaths seems like it would be perfect for a situation like that. Something that's there in the background to give you some nice art to look at whenever your eyes happen to wander toward the screen.
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