This is the kind of movie that, back in the day, one would stumble across on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon on WLVI or WPIX and was so fast moving you would get caught up in it. While not great cinema by any stretch of the imagination, this is actually a fun, quickly paced movie, following the adventures of American prisoners who escape from their prison transfer convoy and try making their way across France to Switzerland. Sure the voices are badly dubbed, and for whatever reason there is no subtitles when characters speak in German, making it difficult to sometimes follow EXACTLY what was going on. But, it moves swiftly, starting out like The Dirty Dozen, becoming an adventure of men trying move incognito through a battlefield to safety, to a mid-movie twist which turns it into a "man-on-a-mission" movie. It really pulls out all the stops, even finding a way, at one point, to show topless women. Fred Williamson, a veteran of blaxploitation/grindhouse movies by this point is particularly fun to watch here. While I'm glad Tarantino didn't decide to do a straight remake of this (there is only a couple of small elements, besides the title, he took from this) it actually is a fun little time waster on its own.
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