If the mullets, vehicles and houses which explode on impact and gratuitous nudity doesn’t efficiently time-stamp this as a glorious product of the 80s, then sadly, it’s treatment of female and black characters, do. The heroine, over the course of the movie, is punched in the face, slapped and dragged by the hair and gets over all this physical trauma in time to hint to the FBI agent who’s protecting her she’d like to fuck his brains out, in spite of her boyfriend being dragged out, mid-coitus, hung from a helicopter, thrown into a river and then gunned down in front of her. Props for bouncing back from tragedy and violence in record time!

The Black co-lead, instead of terrorizing a redneck bar a la Eddie Murphy in 48 HRS, is instead beaten up.

And speaking of getting beat up, ACTION USA must hold some kind of record for having the wimpiest action lead ever. The dude gets his ass handed to him at least 3 times. Jeff Wincott, he ain’t.

But I’ll cut all of the above some slack because I truly believe the makers had their tongue firmly planted in cheek and it’s cheesiness intentional (the asshole boyfriend is played by an actor called ROD SHAFT, for God’s sake!) . In fact, ACTION USA is the best send up of bombastic action clichés since TEAM AMERICA WORLD POLICE, which it pre-dates by 15 years! Without Marionettes!

That, and 90 minutes of glorious stunt-work!

And you can’t help but love a movie whose IMDB Trivia section contains entries like this:

“Despite protestations from the director’s wife, Barri Murphy refused to wear a bra throughout the entire production.”

God Bless Barri Murphy. You should have made more movies.