The Devil's 8 (1969)
** (out of 4)
THUNDER ROAD crashes into THE DIRTY DOZEN in this drive-in flick from AIP. A federal agent (Christopher George) is sent to break up a moonshine business so he recruits six convicts to help with each of them being pardoned if the mission is a success. THE DEVIL'S 8 isn't nearly as fun as one would hope but the cast is good enough to make it worth sitting through at least once. The biggest problem here is that the direction is so weak that there's never really any excitement built up in the story. There's no adventure to the mission that the guys are going on and there's really no suspense anything going wrong. I'm sorry but you can't have people going into a battle and you never once fear that there's something that could go wrong and put them into harm. Another problem is that there's simply no energy to be found so at times it's a real chore just staying interested in what's going on. At 98-minutes the film runs a bit too long and I think there were several scenes that could have been trimmed to help the flow of the picture and make it drag less. The one thing that does work here are the performances with George being a lot of fun as the leader of the group. I've always enjoyed George as a character actor and I thought he gave a good performance here and as usual he's just got a certain charm when it comes to playing a tough guy. The supporting cast includes Fabian and Tom Nardini, both who are good but so are the rest of the players. THE DEVIL'S 8 is mainly going to appeal to those who enjoy watching low-budget rip-offs of bigger and better movies. This thing is far from perfect but it's decent entertainment if you've got nothing better to do.
