Mr No Legs (1978)

For many people, I'm sure, finding themselves watching a film called Mr No Legs (1978) on a fairly obscure streaming channel whose output seems to consist entirely of pirated material, (frequently pirated from other pirate outlets audacious enough to 'watermark' their illicit copies of copyrighted material), would be cause to re-evaluate their lives.  What the Hell am I doing?  How did I get to this?  would be the questions they'd most likely ask.  But for me, it's just another regular night in front of the TV.  As I've noted before, this sort of stuff - usually sourced from fuzzy-looking fifth generation video duplicates - holds a fascination for me.  That said, not just any old crappy film will do: over the years I've fund that there are limits to what I find watchable.  Most contemporary direct-to-video  ultra low budget home movies masquerading as exploitation (which seem all too common these days), are, I find just abut unwatchable they tend to be made by people who've seen too many genuine low budget movies and think that making them is easy.  They also seem to think that being 'ironic' in their approach can make up for the fact that they clearly have no originality or talent whatsoever.  On the other hand, I increasingly find contemporary big budget studio product difficult to watch - too much CGI, not enough characterisation, story or even entertainment value.  Between these two extremes lie a huge swathe of 'stuff' that I'll happily watch, ranging from scuzzily shot seventies B-movies, through often slick-looking exploitation flicks to older-style mainstream movies.

Mr No Legs falls into this category - it's a no-budget, Florida-shot, crime movie which seems to have been intended as a vehicle to launch the acting career of wrestler Ron Slinker.  It has to be said that, as an actor, Slinker is a great wrestler, lacking any real screen presence or charisma.  But that doesn't matter as there's a surprisingly decent supporting cast, headed by the great Richard Jaeckel (an actor as prolific as Cameron Mitchell or William Smith, but who, somehow, seemed to retain more mainstream acceptability than either of them), who pretty much carries the film, breezing through it all, pretty much tongue in cheek.  John Agar (who claimed never to have been paid for his role), is on hand as a bent cop, Lloyd Bochner as a drug kingpin, Luke Halpin (former child star of Flipper) is a dope pusher while Ron Howard's dad Rance lurks around as the low-rent henchman of the main henchman.  The film's main gimmick is Bochner's main enforcer, the titular character who, despite having no legs, has a double-barrelled shotgun concealed in each arm of his wheelchair.  Played by legless martial arts expert Ted Vollrath, when not using his guns, 'Mr No Legs' gives several demonstrations of legless taekwondo.  For a scuzzy, Florida-shot, seventies no budget B-movie, Mr No Legs has a lot of pretty well staged action sequences, including an elaborately (but economically) staged car chase that takes up the last twenty minutes or so of the film.  Which, perhaps, shouldn't be surprising, as it was directed by Ricou Browning (who was the original Creature From the Black Lagoon), a veteran director of second units on bigger budget films, who had also directed the 'Flipper' films, (explaining the presence here of Halpin and Rance Howard).  He makes the most of the film's lack of production resources (it looks as if most of the budget went into that car chase), shooting against some decrepit and run down locations to give the film a suitably seedy look.

Coming after a weekend when I took in a couple of recent 'blockbusters', neither of which felt particularly satisfactory, Mr No Legs came as a real relief.  Utterly unpretentious and unsophisticated, it delivered ninety minutes of straightforward entertainment.  You can't really ask for much more than that.