BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Matrixiole Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Michael_Elliott Invasion U.S.A. (1952) * 1/2 (out of 4) If you listen to most reviewers they'll have you believing that this propaganda film is among the worst movies ever made. The story is pretty simple as a group of strangers are sitting in a bar when the news breaks that the Soviet Union have invaded America. Before long most of America has been hit with an Atomic Bomb.INVASION U.S.A. is considered by many to be one of the worst movies ever made but I think that's rather extremely. There's no question that there are some very bad things in the picture but at the same time it manages to hold you attention no matter how bad things get. I think the biggest problem with the film is the fact that its budget was so low that they really weren't able to do anything good with the picture.I say that because even though the film is only 72-minutes long, I'd say a third of that is made up of stock footage, which obviously makes the picture look cheap. There are so many scenes where it's either stock footage or projection stuff that you can't help but not be frightened by anything you're looking at. The entire point of this picture was to frighten you into thinking that the Soviet Union could strike at any moment but without the drama there's just not much here. To make matters worse, there are some unintentional funny moments including a scene where the Hoover Dam is bombed and a family gets taken out by the water.There are some decent performances here including Gerald Mohr and Dan O'Herlihy. Character actor Tom Kennedy is also on hand playing the bartender. Another problem I had with the story is the fact that America pretty much falls without any issue. I mean, as easy as it was for us to be taken over it would be impossible for America to beat anyone. Still, INVASION U.S.A. isn't nearly the bomb some make it out to be.

a666333 This could have been a serious disaster/war production but with the very low budget on the scale of a minor Republic serial, it falls to grade C propaganda and paranoia. It is not that the effort is bad, per se, there was just not much to work with at any level. Forget about any kind of realistic war scenario here but then again, it is no more nonsensical than Red Dawn was and Red Dawn DID have a substantial budget. In fact, given the realities and psyche of the time, this is at least insightful into that, whereas Red Dawn was a nonsensical fantasy that no one could take seriously even at the time it came out. We do get stock footage from WW2 and Korea with glimpses of almost everything that flew from 1944 through 52 along with ships and heavy AA. Look for Dan O'Herlihy and his first class voice in a smallish but significant role.

bkoganbing Invasion USA must have been Joe McCarthy's favorite movie. Had he become president this would have been required viewing, indoctrination for kids from Kindergarten level on up.The film depicts the Russian invasion of the good old USA from the denizens of Tim's bar in New York City. Among those denizens who meet on a fateful afternoon are TV commentator Gerald Mohr, party girl Peggie Castle, cattle rancher Erik Blythe, industrialist Robert Bice, a member of the House of Representatives and a mysterious stranger who functions in this bizarre tale like Hickey from The Iceman Cometh. In fact the whole thing is like Eugene O'Neill if it were directed by Ed Wood. The stranger is Dan O'Herlihy and Tim is played by Tom Kennedy.While we've been soft capitalists the Communists have been fanatically busy making preparations for war. And they strike through Alaska as Sarah Palin watched from her window. There's no end to their trickery, the invading troops have been schooled in English and are wearing our uniforms, better to confuse the capitalist tools. But when a strike force comes to invade the Capitol Building itself and mow down Congress, an alert National Guardsman questions one of them from an Illinois based unit about the Chicago Cubs. What American doesn't know about them?Through all this invasion Mohr and Castle get down to some serious kanoodling. You've got to have a romance even in the time of our nation's greatest peril.My guess is that the players involved took these roles because they wanted to make themselves blacklist proof. They couldn't all have been that desperate for a paycheck.As for the conclusion, think Dallas and remember to keep giving the military industrial complex what it needs.

Gavno It was the early 1950s. J. Parnell Thomas of The House Unamerican Activities Committee was accusing everyone in sight who had any measure of public visibility with Communist allegiance. He went after Hollywood in a series of highly publicized hearings, resulting in the arrests and convictions of the Hollywood Ten for invoking their Fifth Amendment rights against self incrimination... just before Thomas himself was hauled before a Grand Jury to answer fraud charges. In a moment of high irony Thomas himself invoked the Fifth Amendment before he was convicted and imprisoned.It was the time of "Tail Gunner Joe" McCarthy, who charged that Communist influence in the State Department and Army had caused us to "give away" China. He recklessly charged that Communists had infiltrated nearly every aspect of American life... strictly in the name of enhancing his own political power base. In the Army hearings McCarthy was finally unmasked as an unprincipled charlatan by Army counsel Joseph Welch, and he was subsequently censured by the Senate for unethical conduct. Joe McCarthy subsequently died of alcoholism.Besides these men... Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, and many others in positions of power shrieked the gospel of anticommunism, demanding that Americans surrender Constitutional rights in the name of defeating this new enemy.It was a time of fear where American opinion could be easily manipulated. Partly for financial gain, and partly to spare itself from further attacks by the Thomases and McCarthys, Hollywood became a willing tool for the use of politicians, a propaganda machine that produced a number of sensational films that capitalized on the anti Red hysteria.Some of the more notable Hollywood efforts were the major studio film BIG JIM MACLAIN, starring John Wayne and James Arness, and a B-movie effort, THE RED MENACE, whose opening credits graphic showed an octopus wearing a hammer and sickle logo using it's tentacles to embrace the entire world.Pretty heavy handed stuff, but it was effective for the political manipulation of a frightened American populace. It kept McCarthy off of the studio's backs... as well as made a few B-movie bucks.Along with these heavy, ideological films came INVASION USA, a mythical war and adventure movie. Of the whole lot, THIS is the most interesting of the Red Scare films, and it's the ONLY one that's ANY fun at all! Ed Wood must have LOVED this film; it clearly taught him the cinematic techniques he was to later make famous. As a cost cutting measure the film makes GENEROUS use of stock footage, mostly Public Domain stuff from military sources.To make American planes into enemy ones, they just printed the stock footage BACKWARDS, so that UNITED STATES AIR FORCE on the planes came out REVERSED, and it looked sort of like Russian Cyrillic lettering.In newly shot scenes where stock footage couldn't be used, set decoration relied heavily on the local Army-Navy store! There are literally TONS of military surplus equipment on the sets.The fact that enemy troops were dressed in American military surplus uniforms was explained neatly by saying that they were infiltrating in disguise! As another cost cutting measure, the cast is ENTIRELY made up of B list "talent" who would work for Actor's Equity scale. The amount of over the top, hammy acting has to be seen to be believed! To throw in a touch of sex, a drunken enemy soldier tries to ravage a blonde American beauty, who chooses instead to kill herself by diving out of a window! The script is absurd, but for frightened audiences of the time it was plausible... it bore out all of the dire threats that politicians had been making. Hedda Hopper's review of the film said "It will scare the pants off you!", and so it did. Bombing raids on San Francisco, the Hoover Dam destroyed by a missile attack, and New York City hit with an atomic bomb were enough to scare the pants off of ANYBODY.For sheer kitsch value I give it a ten.As a warning of what propaganda feeding the political hysteria stirred up by unethical politicians can accomplish, it ALSO gets a ten.As movie-making, it gets a four.