Expect No Mercy

Only on the VERY rarest occasions do multiple bad movie ingredients magically coalesce into the most rewardingly flavoursome celluloid cheese, and Zale Dalen's entertainingly bizarre B-fight flick 'Expect No Mercy' is arguably one of the most fragrantly overcooked slices of virtual martial arts mayhem you could ever hope to witness! As this conspicuously Canadian, copiously crap-tastic computerised Kung Foolishness remains a vainglorious virtual calamity!

Muscular martial arts maestro, and telegenic Tae Bo tycoon Billy Blanks energetically unleashes one of his more dynamic performances as the powerhouse, frequently shirtless, eminently clueless government agent tasked to infiltrate the tyrannical terrain of wantonly warped warrior guru Warbeck (Wolf Larson), but Warbeck's queasy charm, rock star good looks and princely chin belie his exquisitely evil supervillain mind! On top of the plentiful array of hyperbolic fight scenes, enjoyably rudimentary CGI, hilariously formulaic text, and silky-sexy synth score by Varouje it's Warbeck's manically unfiltered mannerisms that strongly suggest 'Expect No Mercy' will mercilessly become your brand-new bad movie obsession! To reiterate, Wolf Larson's moorishly odoriferous performance as the pixel chewing wrong 'un Warbeck is worth its weight in 24 month-aged Parmigiano-Reggiano!

I know some of the people who worked on this film, and I still can't stand it. Most of the fight scenes were wooden and boring - your basic B-movie fare, the dialogue bites and was there a plot here? I'm sure someone thought so, but I didn't.

I watched it once to be polite to my friends, but I felt like my foot was caught in a bear trap and I would have to gnaw my own leg off to escape. Never again.

I seems like Billy Blanks and Jalal Merhi are really fond of each other, since they have been in several movies together. Both "Talons of the Eagle" and "TC 2000" were quite good, and so is this one. It's a rather simple, action-packed flick where the action is totally at the center of attention. Action lovers get their dose of everything that's good, both martial arts and gun/explosion-scenes are abundant. Both are really good, and Blanks again does a rather great job in everything he does (except the acting itself, who I don't care about at all). Simple things are often the best. Today's movie makers should take a look at this for a good example of how an action movie should be.

Starring: Billy Blanks, Michael Blanks, Blankety Blanks, Jalal Merhi, Brett Hasley, Lauri Holden (who would go on to star in The Walking Dead!)

Truly Mong Fu from start to finish, Expect No Mercy has Billy Blanks taking on two enemies: an assassin school and computer technology!

Some guy called Warbeck (yeah! The Beyond!) runs a martial arts academy where the students hook up to a machine and go head to head with simulations. It's all very cult-like and Warbeck kind of has some sort of God complex. Also, it's all really just a front for his assassin school, which makes millions wasting people for cash. Warbeck uses his computer technology to plan his executions then watches (and records) the killings via cameras.

When the previous undercover cop turns up dead, the cops recruit Billy Blanks to go undercover and contact Eric, another cop pretending to be an instructor. Billy takes on the virtual enemies, some other students, He hates technology and regularly tells everyone so (especially those guards who are sent to capture him after Eric and Billy are caught uncovering the assassin school thing).

Most of this film is just kung fu fighting. Some in this world, some in the virtual world. The virtual stuff is pretty funny, both retro- wise and mainly for the fact that the virtual enemies are hilarious (wait until you see Billy getting a proper kicking from a ninja, a samuri, a kick boxer, a clown etc all at the same time!) There's a pretty good gun fight right around the one hour mark, but mostly it's Billy and Jalal kicking people's heads in. Billy even faces off against his real life brother in a fight that seems to last about three days.

Expect No Mercy is chock-full of continuity errors (breathing corpses, visible dummies etc), unintentional laughs (check out the positions Billy and Eric are lying in after falling off a building) and dodgy acting (the lead baddie, plus sometimes Billy comes across like he's been kicked in the head too many times).

Not bad though - worth a look if you can tolerate these things.

Nobody will ever wonder why Billy Blanks or Jalal Merhi never received any acting awards (hell, they are quite poor even at delivering the kind of sarcastic one-liners that Arnie excels at), but they can both fight for real, and "Expect No Mercy" gives them plenty of opportunities to show their abilities. And the good news is, they're going against guys who can fight as well: the highlight of the film may be the fight between Billy Blanks and his equally impressive real-life brother Michael. The "virtual-reality martial arts training academy used as a front for an assassination business" is a fairly unusual concept, and the graphics are what you'd expect from a low-budget 1995 DTV movie. Laurie Holden is beautiful and feisty, though not feisty enough to avoid the "damsel-in-distress" role at the end, as even the (overacting) No. 1 villain Wolf Larson points out. The music score is effective. All in all, if you're looking for lots of martial arts action, this film is just what the doctor ordered. **1/2 out of 4.