Wheels of Terror (1987)

  

                    “Wheels of Terror” (“The Misfit Brigade”) is a WWII movie based on the novel by Sven Hassel.  The movie I watched was actually called “Sven Hassel’s Wheels of Terror”.  Hassel was a very popular Danish novelist who wrote a series of novels based on the fictional exploits of some German soldiers in a penal battalion.  The German army assigned malcontents to penal battalions instead of executing them.  It was close to a death sentence because the men were considered to be expendable and were used for suicide missions.  You want a minefield cleared without mine detectors?  According to Hassel, he was writing the books based on his own experiences.  He became the highest selling author in Denmark history, but it was not without controversy.  Some claim, with good reason, that Hassel was in fact a Nazi collaborator and never on the Eastern Front, much less in a penal battalion.  “Wheels of Terror” was his second novel after “The Legion of the Damned” in 1953.  It came out five years later.    I have read both books, but stopped the series because I read several sources that pointed out the rest of the series was much inferior to the first two.  I am not sure why the producers decided to jump to the second novel. 

                    The movie chronicles the misadventures of a tank crew that are in a penal battalion.  The members will be familiar to Hassel fans.  They include Porta (Bruce Davison), Old Man (Keith Szarabajka), Tiny (Jay Sanders), the Legionnaire (David Patrick Kelly), and Sven Hassel (Slavko Stimac).  (Hassel always appears in his books, which are in first-person, but as a minor character.).  The movie is a series of vignettes until the concluding suicide mission.  To give you a taste, at the beginning of the film, the tank crew rescues a woman’s “baby” from some bombed rubble.  It’s actually a kitten!  Ha ha!  This is the first omen that the movie is going to be a comedy.  And it’s going to be terrible.  They bury S.S. dead by using their tank.  Hey, audience, these guys are good Germans who hate Nazis.  Next, there is a hammy fight where the diminutive Legionnaire joins the crew by beating up the hulk Tiny.  (This is one of the few scenes that appear in one of the books, not “Wheels of Terror” though.)  They encounter their villain, a colonel played by David Carradine.  This establishes that they are anti-authority.  He sends them to the Eastern Front where they use two assault guns to battle T-34s.  This is the only decent scene as the tank action is nicely done with the attempts at humor toned down.  Eventually, the “Dirty Dozen” knock-off kicks in as they are sent on the suicide mission to blow up a train.

                    This is one of those movies where you wonder when in the production everyone realizes they are making a piece of shit.  Of course, with this cast, they were probably just happy to be getting a pay check.  The cast has some recognizable faces, but from dramas.  None are noted for comedies.  Take Carradine, for example.  They all seem uncomfortable with the shenanigans.  I don’t know if they realized they were embarrassing themselves.  I hope the screenwriter felt that way. The movie does not know what it wants to be.  I imagine it might have been originally conceived as a gritty war movie with some humor thrown in.  Hassel’s novels were noted for their realistic depiction of warfare on the Eastern Front.  They were devoid of humor.  This movie reverses that.  The film is incoherent as the scenes don’t flow into the next.  There is some lame “war is hell” references, but the movie is basically a farce.

                    Anyone who is a fan of the books has to be very disappointed by this movie.  Sven Hassel may have his name in the title, but the movie has little relation to his book.  He was still alive at the time of its release, but I do not know what he felt about the movie.  Fans could recognize his characters and being a fan helps because you could recognize the personalities.  The movie makes that assumption as there is not character development.  For instance, in the books Porta is a sly thief and Old Man is an old sergeant.  You wouldn’t know that from the movie.  This was supposed to be a small unit movie.  However, it is not really a heterogeneous group of war movie stereotypes.  They are just a group of buffoons.  And their adventures are not funny.  The movie should have been called “The Misfire Brigade”.  Or “Wheels of Terrible”.

GRADE  =  F