The Dirty Dozen - Sequels and Adaptations

Sequels and Adaptations

Three years after The Dirty Dozen was released, Too Late the Hero—a film also directed by Aldrich—was described as a "kind of sequel to The Dirty Dozen". The 1969 Michael Caine film Play Dirty follows a similar theme of convicts-recruited-as-soldiers.

Several made-for-TV movies were produced in the mid- to late-1980s which capitalized on the popularity of the first film. Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine reprised their roles for The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission in 1985, leading a group of military convicts in a mission to kill a German general who was plotting to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In The Dirty Dozen: The Deadly Mission (1987), Telly Savalas, who had played the role of the psychotic Maggott in the original film, assumed the different role of Major Wright, an officer who leads a group of military convicts to extract a group of German scientists who are being forced to make a deadly nerve gas. Ernest Borgnine again reprised his role of General Worden. The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal Mission (1988) depicts Savalas's Wright character and a group of renegade soldiers attempting to prevent a group of extreme German generals from starting a Fourth Reich, with Erik Estrada co-starring and Ernest Borgnine again playing the role of General Worden. In 1988, FOX aired a short-lived television series, with no major stars, that lasted only eleven episodes.