Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2020 November 06 • Friday

One of the weirdest movies we watched recently was Mr. No Legs, more or less a cops vs. drug dealers movie but with the hook that the main bad guy's number one enforcer has no legs but nonetheless manages to murder and terrorize people while in a wheelchair.

The recent blu-ray release was sourced from the only known surviving 35mm print, which happened to be French. So for that reason, while Mr. No Legs is also known as the much more dully titled Killers Die Hard, the version we saw had the even more boring title of L'Infernale Poursuite.

The French version was cut so deleted material was provided from other existing sources, which also yields yet another title, Gun Fighter.

All of these alternate titles are terrible and could be given to thousands of other movies.

What about the movie itself? Well, it's actually pretty bad but not without its points of interest. Of course there's the wheelchair-bound enforcer hismelf, first seen using shotguns that are built into his wheelchair.

In another scene, a bunch of thugs try to kill him by a swimming pool and it's revealed that his wheelchair also has shuriken attached to the wheels.

Those are single-use devices, of course, so after that it's up to his martial arts prowess.

Incredibly, the fight does continue into the pool but Mr. No Legs prevails nonetheless.

And that mostly does it for him. For some reason, the movie doesn't center on him but on the rather generic crime story around him. Perhaps this explains all the other titles. The filmmakers themselves didn't know what their movie was really about.

There are lots of other details to admire. An early love scene looks like some kind of dream sequence from an entirely different movie.

And I like this shot of the cop with the doorknob.

There's some great location use at this dive bar, where Mr. No Legs is hanging out with a person with dwarfism. Outside are two cops. I forget why they're there. Inside there's going to be a bar fight.

ABC Lounge is a good name. So is 7 Seas Bar, with "Beautiful Go Go Dancer Day & Nite".

That's where this scene happens.

There's a guy wearing a Ravi Shankar t-shirt.

And then, what was the most startling thing for me in the whole movie, this sign behind the bartender that says "Sherry Flavored Sauerkraut 5¢ Extra".

There wasn't much of a budget and most of what they had they must have spent on this epic car chase at the end of the movie. Cars jump onto other cars, smash through mobile homes, piles of boxes, piles of blocks of ice.

They even drive on railroad tracks.

Presumably the police cars aren't real police cars because the flashing lights on top appear to be attached with duct tape.

So, this was an actual movie and I actually watched it. It wasn't the astounding jaw-dropping exploitation movie that I expected but it was, in its way, a rare bird.