THE DEVIL'S EIGHT (1969)
Kino-Lorber released a Blue-Ray of this film in August of 2021, so let's take a look at it, shall we?
Directed by: Burt Topper.Written by: John Millius (THE WIND AND THE LION), Willard Huyck (AMERICAN GRAFFITI), Larry Gordon (48 HOURS), and James Gordon White (THE INCREDIBLE TWO HEADED TRANSPLANT *and* THE THING WITH TWO HEADS).
Starring: Christopher George, Ross Hagen, Fabian, Leslie Parrish, screenwriter Larry Bishop, Robert DoQui, Ron Riflkin (with hair!).
Produced by: Jack W. Cash.
Cinematography by: Richard C. Glouner (PAYDAY).
Music by: Michael Lloyd & Jerry Styner.
You may think that The Asylum Studios created the "mockbuster" movie like THE DAY THE EARTH STOPPED (which means it stood still) and many many others like I AM OMEGA (I AM LEGEND and OMEGA MAN), but coming up with a cheap knock off of a big budget studio film is nothing new in this business, and probably goes back to the silent era. So we are going to kill a couple of birds with the same stone in this entry and look at a B movie knockoff of THE DIRTY DOZEN which also happens to be ground zero for a bunch of screenwriters who would become very famous in five years and a co-star who has been in a couple of movies that I have written, and is one of those charismatic B actors who can take some stupid line that I wrote and deliver it as if it were Shakespeare and make me look good. I saw this film on the big screen at the New Beverly Cinema on a doubke bill with one of my favorite films, THE WIND AND THE LION, a few years back...
THE DEVILS 8 begins with a great opening scene, very much like the opening of 48 HOURS, chain gang somewhere in the South with prisoners doing backbreaking work (though, none of it made much sense - one guys was breaking rocks and another guy was throwing them in a lake! One guy was just sawing boards. But its was all hard work stuff) - then a fight breaks out between prisoners: one of them is our star Christopher George from RAT PATROL. Just like in 48 HOURS, the fight is a way for the prisoners to overpower the guards and escape. George grabs a bunch of prisoners - 8 of them - and says he has an escape route. They run through the woods, coming out at a clearing... where a huge helicopter lands! There are *military guys* with guns in the helicopter! George tells the guys not to worry - this is part of the plan. What plan?
Cool flashback to George and some hottie making out in a car when his carphone rings (when this film was made, that was sci-fi or James Bond) and it’s a mission. George has to stop making out and go to do some spy work. In this case - it’s breaking up a huge moonshine operation run by this GODFATHER-like guy named Burl, played by some fat old guy. Seems that Burl’s organization has Senators and Congressmen and Police and maybe even FBI guys on his payroll. He’s a big fish, and George is supposed to find some way to take him down.
We get out of the flashback in another cool screen-bending dissolve...
And here’s where we begin to run into trouble. Because DEVILS 8 has some serious structure problems. Because it’s a knock off of THE DIRTY DOZEN, it kind of steals the way that film worked - where about half of the film is training a bunch of anti-authority criminals to become good enough soldiers to complete the mission... and all of the conflicts involved in having a dozen guys with bad attitudes who hate each other living under the same roof. Then, the last half is the mission against the Nazis - and how it goes wrong but they still manage to blow the hell out of the place. Okay, that works for DIRTY DOZEN because the mission is complicated and the guys are a major challenge to train. But in DEVILS, even though the guys are escaped prisoners and have all kinds of conflict with each other - including racial: Henry (Robert DoQui) is pretty much hated by everyone because he’s black - there isn’t a single psycho like Telly Savalas or a real hardcase like John Cassavetes. These 8 convicts may all be lifers, but they are reasonable guys. So the conflict between them is not as intense as it is in DOZEN. Plus, the training is, well, mostly lame. They wrestle. All at once. No one is trained in karate or something, they just all wrestle. They learn to shoot guns, but it’s kind of boring target practice without any tension. They learn to drive crappy cars through a slalom course of cones - wow! Though there are some car wrecks here that really help this section of the film - there aren’t enough crashes and they aren’t very cool and they aren’t *story related*. Just a car crashing in the middle of nowhere.
This half of the movie ends with some crazy stuff - throwing grenades out of cars for no apparent reason. Well, actually, by the end of the film they will have to do this, but in the training camp it makes no sense. And there isn’t any clear set up in this that pays off in that later scene - it’s just a scene where they get to blow up garbage cans with grenades - kind of false action.
They really needed to create conflicts between team members and milk them during the training scenes. This is usually where I bring up the large cast of characters in ALIENS and how we knew each one of them and they were *paired* in the story with the person they had the most conflict with. to keep even the small scenes full of conflict and drama and create arcs for each character... and that doesn't happen here. If they had done that, and then had some *real* hand to hand combat training instead of wrestling and some more interesting target practice (maybe some practice storming a house) and other things that could become very dangerous if your partner wanted to kill or eff you up, the first half of the film would have been entertaining (instead of a slog). Look for the *personal conflicts* in your story and pair up characters!
After their training is over, they go out to somewhere in the South where Burl’s moonshine gang rules the roads.
And here’s the crazy part about this film - the star is Christopher George from RAT PATROL, but the great role in the film - the “lead” in a way - is Ross Hagen playing Frank Davis, ex-moonshine runner and ex-member of Burl’s Gang. Part of this may be Ross acting the hell out of his role, and part of it is that this is the most interesting character in the film once we get to moonshine country. Though Frank was an important character in the training scenes, when we get the ex-gang member back into gang country he becomes the center of the conflict. Ross (who passed away in 2011) was in a couple of films I’ve written, and was one of those actors that can turn the line “How are you?” into two dozen different things - he came to the show with interesting line readings you’d never considered or ever knew existed. He was a great actor for low budget movies because you just hire him and he gives a good performance. He had a bunch of low budget films and a whole bunch of TV guest star stuff on his resume...
But in DEVILS 8 he steals the film from Christopher George.
Steals it from the star.
In order to get him to work against his old gang, George tells him that it wasn’t cops who killed his brother, it was Burl. Now, we don’t know if that’s true or not at that point, and that’s a good technique to use in a script because it turns one moment into several moments. He tells Frank (Ross) that Burl killed his brother, and Frank has to deal with being betrayed by his own gang. Then Frank wonders if George lied to him in order to get him to work against his own gang - and there are some mistrust moments. Once they get to town, Frank discovers that Burl *did* kill his brother, and this confirmation takes us back to Frank feeling betrayed... and then angry... and then grabbing a weapon and going after Burl! Which will blow the whole operation!
George’s plan to take down Burl doesn’t make any sense, but here it is: The 8 are going to hijack whisky shipments until Burl comes to them and makes a deal that they should work together, and show them where the stills are, and tell them who all of the crooked cops and politicians are. Wouldn’t it be easier for Burl to just kill them all? Oddly enough, the plan works...
A couple of scenes later, Frank and George show up at Burl’s place... and guess who the gang boss is sleeping with? Cissy! And Frank has to just take it and not do anything when the man who killed his brother is also sleeping with the woman he loves! That *situation* makes Frank the most important character in the film. On a message board someone asked why we need a character arc, and I said my usual: that I like to think of it as the “emotional conflict” rather than the character arc because it covers more ground. This is a great example of an “emotional conflict” - Frank’s character doesn’t really have much of an arc. Sure, he goes from being a convict to a guy working with the feds, and he becomes more cooperative with George, but his plan is pretty much to kill the guy who killed his brother, and that plan doesn’t change. He wants revenge, he will get revenge. No real arc, there. But he goes through all kinds of emotional hell in this film. He goes back to his home town and is ostracized and has to watch Burl put his fat hands all over the woman he loves and wants to kill the sucker but can’t because it will blow the mission. Compare Ross Hagen’s role of Frank with Christopher George’s cool spy guy who has no emotional conflicts at all, and you wonder why Chris George didn’t demand to play Frank.
Oh, somewhere along here I recognized the fat actor who played Burl... as 1950s pretty boy actor Ralph Meeker (who played Mike Hammer in KISS ME DEADLY) - man, he got fat! One of the reasons I didn't recognize Meeker until late in the film is that he isn't credited in this film until the end. But Meeker went from pretty boy to playing pudgy Southern Cop roles in only a few years. He was a character actor on a million TV shows in the 70s, and retired after the killer pancake movie WITHOUT WARNING. Here he does a great job as the pudgy good old boy moonshiner.
While Ross Hagen is stealing the film from the star, the other guys on the team kill time until the big ending by skinny dipping with hot girls from town and getting into bar room brawls. This stuff all seems like padding - and the big structure problems is that it *is* padding - the film has prison break in scene one and a big action scene at the end and the rest is mostly filler material. Some of it is entertaining filler material, but it kind of slows down the pacing because nothing *important* is happening. This movie gets the cat up the tree and then gets it down, but never throws rocks at it... and makes you realize how important structure is in a screenplay.
One thing I should mention are the characters of the other guys, because they are much better than most low budget exploitation flicks. Singer Fabian is one of the guys, I think the mechanic, and Ron Rifkin is one of the guys - but I have no idea which one because I did not recognize him. Rifkin was in the new version of A STAR IS BORN and on NEW AMSTERDAM (I have never watched that show) and was the evil Sloane on ALIAS (Okay, I have watched that one) and I know him as a middle aged man... and this film was made in 1969 - it was his very first film! I have no idea which one of those young guys was Rifkin. But he may or may not have been the drunk one.... One of the guys has been on the chain gang for a while and the first thing he thinks of when they escape is finding himself a drink. When they hijack Burl’s runners, he swipes some bottles for himself and gets really drunk... and becomes a problem because he’s an alcoholic working undercover as a rum-runner - and keeps getting drunk and screwing up. Except - while searching for something to drink, he spots a truck full of booze and climbs in... and the truck goes to the secret still compound. Now he is not only so drunk he can’t stand, he has the information the team needs for that big action ending.
And we get a big action ending where that throwing hand grenades from a moving car training comes in handy, and most of the 8 die glorious deaths. But the big end action scene is much simpler than the end scene in DIRTY DOZEN and shorter, too. So where DIRTY DOZEN has that big killer action end that is at least a full third of the film, DEVILS 8 has a good action ending but not good enough to make up for the padding that has come before it. Still, they blow up 3 or 4 big stills in towers and wreck any car they have not yet wrecked. The problem is, the action scene isn't fleshed out - it's too simple. Destroy the stills. Okay, they do that and the story is over. What they needed to so is come up with a series of steps and set backs on the way to destroying the stills and Burl's operation. This is why the *writing* is an important part of action scenes - you need to figure out all of the small conflicts and set backs along the way to the big explosion at the end. If you look at the end of 48 HOURS the end action scene is complicated - it begins with the hijacked bus, has a trade for the girl, a big crash and a shoot out and a moment where the regroup and then go to Chinatown for the final action sequence which is made up of several parts - the shoot out at the women's apartment where Billy Bear and Gance were hiding, the shootout with Billy Bear, a chase over Chinatown's rooftops (a maze chase) and finally a high noon shootout between Cates and Gance. All of these steps escalate the final action scene and keep it exciting with twists and turns - we don't just have the big shootout at the women's apartment and it's over, Billy Bear and Gance *escape* (setback) and then Billy Bear and Reggie have a shoot out scene and then we have the chase and then... It's not "they fight", it's a series of scenes and moments. The problem with the action scenes in DEVIL'S 8 is the complete lack of complications and details. For a drive in movie, it needed more action!
I should mention the music - there’s a theme song that’s okay, but the score was just awful. Mike Curb was to blame. It’s kind of SMOKEY & THE BANDIT funny good old boy music, when this film is not a comedy at all. There are scenes where characters are getting *hurt* and this goofy music is playing in the background. It did not work. The theme was fine - one of those ballad things.
THE DEVIL'S 8 is one of those throw away drive in movies they made back in the day, with some great performances and a bunch of screenwriters who would later become famous. Larry Gordon would produce John Millius's DILLINGER in 1973 and then produce Walter Hill's greatest hits. Maybe worth a look, just for the talent that would soon become famous.
- Bill
