Contra Conspiracy

My review was written in April 1990 after watching the movie on City Lights video cassette.

"Contra Conspiracy" combines two different premises with occasionally interesting results, suitable for video action fans.

Pic is structured in flashback as a young girl tells CIA brass of a massacre at a remote movie set in the desert where her filmmaker father and his unit are attacked by mercenaries training nearby for covert U. S. action.

Though obviously overmatched, the film crew fights back using their special effects expertise to even up the odds.

Pic stretches credibility in linking a behind the scenes look at a movie shoot with the gung ho heroics of self-styled Rambo warriors. The heroine also relates several scenes set at the mercenaries' camp which she could not have witnesses.

Acting is okay though end credits are absent, leaving roles unidentified. Finale of CIA ordering a coverup is predictable.

A Pepin-Merhi action flick produced threw their City Lights company and oddly distributed by the Troma team. There's a half decent idea and some nice stunt work in this, but it suffers from a lot of the usual early PM problems as the obviously really low production and budget hampers it.

There's still a couple of moments like a soldier comically getting his leg blown off, the tough guy right wing militia co-leader whose name is ironically Hillary, two border patrol agents driving a beat-up station wagon, and the main big bad played by Tom Maher going out in the most anti-climactic way possible. They try to blow their action budget at the end and go for it, but it just doesn't quite come together.