1980s B movie stud Rick Hill ("Deathstalker") plays Deacon Porter, a Vietnam veteran suffering from nightmares. He goes to the small town of Kings' Ransom to investigate the death of his former C.O., and finds that he will be up against an army of evil marijuana growers. To combat them, he will assemble the members of his old squad: Spencer (Terrence O'Hara, "Naked Vengeance"), Bartlett (Bill McLaughlin, "Silk"), and Ox (Jack S. Daniels, "Wheels of Fire"). The main bad guy is a cocky creep named Carey, played by Crofton Hardester ("Android"), and the leading lady, Audrey (Katt Shea, "Psycho III"), works at the local service station.
"The Devastator" is the kind of undemanding cheesy B you watch if you just want to relax and give your brain a rest. Awash in cliches, it has a very silly script (by Joseph Zucchero) complete with the kind of lines the viewer will doubtless have heard before. (For one thing, the morally compromised Sheriff (Kaz Garas, "Ben") has little patience for anybody he deems to be an outsider.) Director Cirio Santiago here takes a bit of a break from the slew of post-nuke flicks he also made during the 1980s, crafting some very fast-moving nonsense. Its frequent action scenes are not exactly that slick, but they're certain to amuse the audience regardless. In any event, it's hard to completely knock a movie that often exists mainly for the purpose of blowing stuff up. The music is so awful it's downright hilarious; it doesn't sound composed so much as improvised on the spot. The acting is suitable for this genre: Hill is a decent enough hero, and Hardester is a hoot as the kind of unflappable bad guy who sticks a flower in a gun barrel when Shea tries to intimidate him. She's very sexy and enticing, and went on to a solid filmmaking career of her own, directing things like "Dance of the Damned", "Streets", "Poison Ivy", and "The Rage: Carrie 2". Tough guy Daniels' goofy performance is so utterly cheese-ball that it's priceless.
Good fun, provided one is partial to this sort of thing in the first place.
Five out of 10.