Wonderful character development!

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The cast makes all the difference in this reasonably amusing adaptation of a WWII novel by Sven Hassle (who's played in the film by Slavko Stimac). It's basically a variation on the Dirty Dozen formula, in which a group of misfits - including those who had been in prison - are recruited by the Nazis to be a fighting force. Our "misfit brigade" are sent on a delicate mission to get beyond the Russian border and destroy a train. They are told that if they succeed at this task, they can enjoy an early "retirement".Adequately directed by cult filmmaker Gordon Hessler ("The Golden Voyage of Sinbad"), the movie has a fairly colourful band of characters. These men are very much anti-authority and also pretty much anti-Nazi, resulting in an interesting hook. On location filming in Yugoslavia is one nice touch; period recreation is also good. Hessler manages to create some tension and the action is decently executed.This group of familiar faces does look to be having a good time. Bruce Davison ("Willard"), David Patrick Kelly ("Dreamscape"), D.W. Moffett ("Traffic"), Jay O. Sanders ("The Day After Tomorrow"), and Keith Szarabajka ("The Dark Knight") are among our heroes. If you're watching this as a fan of Oliver Reed, be warned that he only shows up at the end, with just a handful of lines. David Carradine is most amusing in his turn as a sneering Nazi officer. One does have to suspend their disbelief quite a bit with these very Americanized performances, and with no real attempt made to make people look Germanic.Personally speaking, this viewer did not have a problem with the light hearted approach of this adaptation. The healthy dose of humour does keep it watchable. It's nothing great, but it offers some fun.Seven out of 10.

I should say it's a very poor man's CROSS OF IRON. The spirit is the same: German army troops, a platoon actually, lost in the middle of the Russian front. I won't add anything more to the other comments, which are very interesting concerning details, except, again, that the screenwriter was inspired by Sam Peckinpah's war movie shot in 1977. Brutal vision of war from the German side, in Russia, without any glorification of this very same war, helped by a powerful characterization - for this kind of production, I mean. A war movie that ends with a sort of moral. The cowardliness of the superior officers is pointed out very clearly. In this movie, they are not Maximilien Schell but Oliver Reed and David Carradine.A pretty good ending.

I just saw The Misfit Brigade / Wheels Of Terror and I loved it. This is American style entertainment, simple and plain, all traditional, unsophisticated, popular, more quality of a TV series than a movie - and GOOD I could just eat the disc. This is America, so horribly underrated by high-nosed Europeans - and by Americans themselves! The film is based on a Sven Hassle novel about a German tank crew on the Eastern Front in WWII. So American in style and quality. Those typical easygoing toughs fixing everything with perfect, soundly unrealistic ease.An unpretentious, slightly silly film with lots of action and solid humor, and I already know this will be one I will frequently see again. In short: Banality At It's Best.

For almost two years I successfully resisted renting this movie. That resistance was certainly aided by the cheap looking case of the video, and the fact that director Gordon Hessler is known (if at all) in the US only for a trio of cheap, British, AIP horror flicks, "Scream and Scream Again" being marginally the most watchable of the lot. But the desire to see what Hessler and his mostly American TV actor cast would do with such material, and the need for relief from a recent diet of "serious" indie film viewing, pushed me over the edge to spend the whole one dollar rental fee. Obviously "the Misfit Brigade" is no masterpiece, but it was far better than I expected, and, as others have pointed out, occasionally rises to the level of pretty damn good. I loved, for instance, the sequence in which the misfits watch a Soviet propaganda film projected on a large screen across the front line. I don't know if this ever happened, and if it did, I doubt he films would have had the big studio production values of the one presented. The bordello sequence was also funny, and reminded me of the humor in some of the better Italian westerns. There was also the occasional visually striking shot. I particularly liked the long tracking shot that begins on a Russian peasant coming to a road, then follows a Russian military vehicle through the gates of a compound, then swoops up on a crane to the roof, where a German soldier is observing the vehicle. Then, in subtitled Russian, someone yells, "There's a Kraut on the roof," and we cut to a shot of the rest of the misfits (some distance away) as we here automatic weapons' fire on the soundtrack. This is damn good sequence. I've read in his mini biography here on Imdb, that Hessler worked for Hitchcock's TV unit at Universal before directing features. This long tracking shot is certainly similar to one of Hitch's, and even shares a bit of the master's dark humor. But, OK, this film is not art. It is somewhat choppy (at least in the U.S. video version), and the low budget shows in some of the action sequences. Still, it's a fun little movie if one can accept its limitations. Even David Carradine seems to be enjoying his minor role as an uptight German officer. Oliver Reed is not on screen very long as a pompous German general who arrives at the end of the film to decorate the misfit heros. I cannot agree that his attitude during the air raid which follows detracts from the film's "realism." This is all slapstick anyway, which accounts for the film's final cut, before some graphic violence would have betrayed it's lighthearted mood.