Review: The Devil's 8 (1969)
"All they had was a skill for violence and nothing to lose but their lives!" 1969's The Devil's 8 is often compared to The Dirty Dozen , which had wowed audiences two years before by combining the familiar "men on a mission" story with rich character development and gritty violence. In truth, this sort of nihilistic approach was becoming more and more popular in the Vietnam-era, and films with expendable characters from the wrong side of the tracks were big audience draws. Exploitation/genre studio American International Pictures had been riding a huge wave of success off the back of a string of bikers-gone-wild pictures such as 1968's The Savage 7 , and the appeal of watching a group of anti-heroes take on insurmountable odds while dying in the process seemed like a safe box office bet. The Devil's 8 switches up the setting from the battlefields of war to the backroads of moonshine country. The plot in brief: federal agent Faulkner (Christopher ...
