Essay: That time Chuck Norris scared me straight
The anti-drug, all-American awfulness of 1984's 'Invasion U.S.A.'
I was inundated with anti-drug messages in the mid-80s, which was a far more buttoned-up time than today.
I remember President Reagan and his wife, First Lady Nancy Reagan, launching their “Just Say No” campaign on TV in 1986, when I was twelve. The following year, a famous commercial comparing drugs to a hot skillet and your brain to a raw egg started playing during my favorite after-school cartoons.
The permissive 60s & 70s were over; the generation that experimented with turning on, tuning in, and dropping out were making money, jogging, and praying, and their children would not be degenerates.
The dope-smoking hippies were dead, and the beer-chugging hard hats were in charge.
There was a multi-front War on Drugs, and the imaginations of white suburban boys and girls were one of the battlefields. This propaganda wouldn’t work for long — I eventually went to college and did drugs. Lots of drugs. I did drugs and drank booze for years and years, and that’s a whole other story.
But as a kid, I was terrified of reefer and smack and goofballs, which was the point.
My earliest memory of the evils of drugs was from the 1985 movie Invasion U.S.A., starring Chuck Norris, the bearded, chaotic cowboy with multiple black belts who was friends with the late martial arts icon Bruce Lee.
The 85-year-old legend is a right-wing Republican, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise. The man has symbolized conservative values like “shoot first” and “never smile” for decades.
Chuck Norris was never a tough guy mega-star like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, and his movies were not blockbusters. But his low-budget one-man-army shoot ’em ups were entertaining law-and-order fantasies that usually climaxed with Norris unleashing one of his signature roundhouse kicks on the main bad guy. And Invasion U.S.A. is no exception.
Invasion U.S.A. is a movie about everything Americans were afraid of at the beginning of Reagan’s second term: terrorists, drug lords, and communists. All three show up to wreak havoc on our fair country. The plot is wonderfully simple, and if you haven’t seen it, the movie’s name is a clue.
There’s a graphic anti-drug scene early in the movie that scarred me as an eleven-year-old, featuring the primary villain, Soviet agent Rostov, played by Richard Lynch. Now, this is a Chuck Norris movie. He is the star — his mullet, hairless chest, and tight blue jeans. That’s what we’re watching—a juicy, patriotic slice of USDA prime rib. But Lynch, whose unique facial scars were the result of a drug-fueled accident in the ‘60s, steals the movie with every hiss and sneer and megalomaniacal outburst.
Now, back to L’Affaire Invasion U.S.A.: Rostov makes a drugs-for-weapons deal with a shady thug and his junky girlfriend in his high-rise hideout. Billy Drago is the hustler, and you may recognize him as Frank Nitti in Brian DePalma’s classic The Untouchables or in about a dozen other movies where he plays a scumbag. The drug deal is progressing as Hollywood drug deals do, which means someone has to sample the goods. And that someone is the junky girlfriend, who starts snorting lines of blow with a metal straw.
Rostov doesn’t believe in fair play, obviously, so he decides to murder everyone. First, while she’s bent over, he slams the junky girlfriend’s head down onto the metal straw, impaling her.
She recoils, screaming, bleeding, clawing at her nose. Then Rostov, for good measure, throws her out a window and onto the street below. Next, he shoots Drago’s character in the genitals and blows away his toadies. The violence is sudden and shocking, and the message is clear: drugs and communism are bad.
I was horrified by the woman’s murder. I also swore to myself I’d never do cocaine. And I kept my promise until I grew up and discovered that cocaine is, in fact, a lot of fun for a little while, and then it’s not. I learned that cocaine does not cause brain stabbing and defenestration, but it does cause bankruptcy, nonstop babbling, and life-destroying addiction problems. It is not good for you, but not for the reasons I had been told.
The entire scene is funny when watched from the safety of 2025, but I assure you it was the raw material of my nightmares for weeks afterward. And in a way, it is the most intense moment in the movie because it’s so brutal and, most of all, unexpected.
The action in Invasion U.S.A. is mostly henchmen clutching their chests and dying en masse as Chuck Norris slowly walks towards them while firing his matching MAC-10 submachine guns. There is hardly any gore except for that poor speared cokehead.
The rest of the film is pretty straightforward: the CIA begs former supersoldier Matt Hunter to help defeat the evil plans of his old Cold War nemesis, you-know-who. At first, Norris’ Hunter refuses the offer, but Rostov has two things on his mind: revenge and invading the U.S.A. He takes a break from invading the U.S.A. to try to kill Hunter, and he makes a classic mistake: he kills Hunter’s friend.
Director Joseph Zito knows what American men and boys want, and that’s bang-bangs and ka-booms. His movie is both hilarious and meat-and-potatoes barcalounger warrior war porn.
The mid-1980s were also a time when American culture was wrestling with the sins of the Vietnam War. Oliver Stone’s groundbreaking war drama Platoon came out that same year, and \Stanley Kubrick would release Full Metal Jacket in 1986, a bleak examination of the only war America had ever lost. One of Norris’s most successful films was 1984’s Missing in Action, a POW-rescue fantasy that was instantly forgotten when Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo: First Blood Part II hit theaters in 1985.
But in Invasion U.S.A., it’s as if Vietnam never happened, and we’re told a different story about the time Chuck Norris single-handedly won a new war against the enemies within. Hell yeah. U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
Invasion U.S.A. isn’t a good movie. There’s no pithier or wittier way to say it. It’s awful and uninspired. A feature-length, wingnut political ad. Zito aims to please, but he has the visual flair of a soap opera camera operator and absolutely zero sense of irony. The screenplay, written by James Bruner and Norris himself, is mostly a collection of monosyllabic caveman words. Norris is lean and stone-faced; his fists and boots are spring-loaded, and his facial hair is a manly, well-groomed carpet. He doesn’t need dialogue, save for a few hollow-point bon mots here and there.
There are better, more violent, and offensive action movies from this era — nearly every cinematic killing spree in which human mega-sausage Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in during this period is both profoundly brain-dead and highly entertaining — and, sadly, Invasion U.S.A. never elevates the genre the way Ah-nuld’s Commando does.
But what it was very good at doing was trying to indoctrinate little pimply pre-adolescent me into joining the fraternity of right-wing kooks who love this country so much they regularly end up strangling it, but, thankfully, for me, 1985 was also the year my mom made me watch Cabaret, Bob Fosse’s 1972 musical about theatre kids versus Nazis (there’s a definite winner and it’s not the theatre kids.)
One of the big moments is the actual invasion of the U.S.A.: a few Normandy-style landing boats hit a Florida beach, and out pour a few hundred invaders, an eclectic mix of outlaws in sunglasses, berets, and mismatched Army surplus camo. I counted numerous mustaches. This ragtag army is supposed to be an alliance of Cubans, Russians, and mercenaries, but they look like a casting call for weekend bikers.
(It goes without saying that all of these Marxist goons are also undocumented.)
This invading horde then jumps into waiting trucks, and off they go into the night. Their goal? Bedlam. Another of my favorite scenes is when Rostov uses a grenade launcher to blow up a wholesome American neighborhood. At the time, this scenario genuinely concerned me, a child with minimal knowledge of geopolitics or national security. Could the commies show up outside my house in a pick-up and toss bombs through my windows?
Thankfully, Rostov only had enough explosives to frag a few blocks of the Sunshine State. A more accurate title would have been Invasion Miami Suburbs. That’s the budget Zito was working with. But don’t worry, Chuck is there to do what the U.S. government can’t do, which is to stop terrorism, drugs, and the USSR.
The ending of Invasion U.S.A. is a massive gunfight between the commie bastards and the U.S. Army. There are tanks, heavy machine guns, and M16 rifles. The showdown is a bazooka-off in an office hallway between Rostov and Norris, and guess who explodes? That’s right. Adios, pinko, and God Bless Chuck Norris.
Oh, yeah, and say “no” to drugs, kids.
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Not to be confused with INVASION AMERICA, an increasingly obscure serious animated series from the late 90s about a kid who discovers he's half-alien and his extraterrestrial kin are planning to use him to figurehead an invasion (of America, obviously).
Haven’t thought of this movie since I pulled a copy off the shelf at my local video store. I don’t want to tell you what to write, but if you wrote a book about Chuck Norris I’d buy a copy to read for myself and one for all my friends who grew up watching Invasion USA, Delta Force, Missing in Action etc.