June 30: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Sequels! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

There’s no reason why sixth Universal Soldier movie is so good.

There’s also no reason why it goes so hard, because this is an NC-17 movie that starts with the hero, John (Scott Adkins), watching his wife and young daughter get shot in the head in a POV shot by Luc Deveraux (Jean-Claude Van Damme), who until now has been the hero of the UniSols.

And I mean, who could have guessed that director John Hyams would bring Apocalypse Now, The Manchurian Candidate, Chinatown and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to — again — the sixth movie in the series that started with a blockbuster.

John wakes up from a coma, only to learn that Luc is on the run and a sleeper agent named Magnus (Andrei Arlovski, the most winning fighter in UFC history) is on the loose, wiping out an entire brothel before a clone of Andrew Scott (Dolph Lundgren) wipes his memory clear and frees him.

So yes, in the midst of this brave new world, Deveraux and Scott are gathering UniSols and radicalizing them against the U.S. government. I am all for this wildness.

John also learns that he was once a truck driver, that he was in love with Sarah (Mariah Bonner) and that he can regrow body parts because he’s an unstoppable killing machine. There’s also that original John, who has been co-opted by the government and the idea that everything that the new John believes is just weeks, not years, old.

Spoilers on, because the act of removing John’s memories drives him insane and he starts killing every UniSol, but that’s all part of Deveraux’s plan, to find a successor and sacrifice himself to him so that the dream of a new world order of UniSols can finally come true.

Written by Hyams, Doug Magnuson and Jon Greenlagh, this is a movie that starts with a doomed little girl saying “There are monsters in this house” and ends with Van Damme and Adkins having a strobe-lit, face-painted death match with machetes.

“From this moment on, you are no longer a slave to the government. From this moment on, your mind is your own. From this moment on, you will seek vengeance from your oppressors. Freedom is yours.”

Show me any action movie — hell, movie! — that tries for such loftier ideals and does it with three action stars and an MMA fighter in its cast. The fact that it took me so long to absorb this movie is a bit of stupidity I am going to pay back by being an evangelist for this film.