No Place to Hide Reviews

This is a minor entry in the "conspiracy cinema" trend that enjoyed a brief vogue in the Hollywood films of the mid-1970s after the Watergate crisis had jarred America's conscience. The short-lived subgenre paints a grim portrait of the American government and depicts bureaucratic institutions as fundamentally corrupt and dangerous. While some of the films that sprang from this artistic mood are solid, interesting thrillers (THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR; ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN; TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING), many are nothing more than left-wing, knee-jerk reactions to Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. Among these simple-minded films is NO PLACE TO HIDE (the title alone betrays the sense of paranoia extolled by the filmmakers), a thin drama about a group of antiwar hippies being destroyed by the evil FBI, which has planted an undercover agent in their midst. The FBI man seduces the otherwise peaceful radicals into performing terrorist activities so he can put them all away for life. In the cast is a young Stallone just a few years before his ego and biceps would inflate to monstrous proportions and bring to the American screen in the 1980s a trend of right-wing, xenophobic films (RAMBO; ROCKY IV).