YMMV / Invasion U.S.A. (1952)

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The paperboy walking in while the hero and his Love Interest gaze into one another's eyes. However the staging does help foreshadow the reveal that it's All Just a Dream later.
  Paperboy: (From off-screen) Ex-tra, Pa-per, America invaded, read all about it! (Comes onscreen from behind the couple, stares openly at the couple, turns around, walks off-screen while repeating previous line.)^note Mike: (guffawing) Now that's a walk-on!
• Broken Aesop: To defeat Communism, cede your time, money, businesses, and even identity to your government and country. In other words, defeat communism with more communism! Near the beginning of the film, the tractor manufacturer even explicitly refers to the universal draft as communism.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Once you realize that Mr. Ohman is hypnotizing the bar patrons with his decanter of wine at the beginning of the film, the All Just a Dream ending becomes all too telegraphed.
• Head Scratchers: It's All Just a Dream and everyone snaps out of it at the same time, but everyone is killed at different times throughout. What are the dead experiencing while the living are waiting their turn?
• Nightmare Fuel: For all the film's excessive Stock Footage, misplaced Patriotic Fervor, and misunderstanding of Nuclear Weapons, the imagery of familiar American landmarks being bombed-out and conquered by "The Enemy" is chilling... until the ridiculous All Just a Dream ending, at least.
• Retroactive Recognition: Both actresses who would later go on to play Lois Lane in TV's The Adventures of Superman (Noel Neill and Phyllis Coates) are in this movie.
• Values Dissonance: The whole film plays like a xenophobic fantasy, filled with hysterical appeals to emotion (the old "THEY'LL COME FOR OUR WOMEN" chestnut^note Though invading soldiers DO tend to violate women appears in the last minutes of the dream) and backstabbing foreigners that are of course commie Double Agents. And most egregiously, the apparent Aesop that, in order to combat The Forces of Communism, one has to cede everything to the government to protect us... which the producers don't seem to understand is essentially Stalinism in practice.

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