Unarmed But Dangerous

I'm not about to big this film up as anything extraordinary - it's cheap and looks it, and neither the acting or direction is going to win any awards. The Godfather, it most certainly ain't. But despite the technical shortcomings, I was thoroughly entertained throughout, the film definitely delivering the goods as a trashy piece of exploitation.

Mat Fraser plays disabled kickboxer Jimmy Loveit, who springs into action when hitmen break into his flat and shoot his wife Lu (Helen Watkins), having mistaken their home for someone else's. Jimmy disarms one of the gunmen and shoots him in the balls, but the other guy makes off with Jimmy's young daughter Lola (Bethan Leret). While Jimmy rushes his wife to a nearby veterinary surgeon (which suggests that all those kicks to the head have damaged his brain), crime boss Barry (Frank Harper), whose son is now a eunuch thanks to Jimmy's marksmanship, vows revenge.

The most unusual thing about Unarmed and Dangerous (AKA King Fu Flid) isn't the fact that star Fraser has thalidomide-induced phocomelia - after all, martial arts movies featuring genuinely disabled performers go back as far the '70s (with the old-school kung fu flick The Crippled Masters).

No... what is really strange as far as I am concerned is that this relentlessly grim low-budget gangster/kickboxing revenge flick-which is full of sex, drugs and graphic violence, and relatively little martial arts-also stars Faye Tozer from kiddie-friendly pop group Steps, the singer playing the hard-faced, slutty, drunken, foul-mouthed wife of crime boss Barry. If you've ever wanted to see Faye rogered from behind, uttering the 'C' word and having her head melted by acid, then this is the film for you.

I can't imagine the how the film's violence would go down with most Steps fans: Barry has Jimmy's wife (and her vet) brutally tortured by a sadistic Scotsman (Dan Poole), who is handy with a scalpel, a man is dismembered in a bath, and an undercover cop is forced to pick a severed head out of a bucket before getting cracked on the skull with a hammer. Perhaps Tozer was trying to distance herself from her wholesome pop image at the time, but now she's back singing again, I wonder if this is something she would happily talk about.

6.5/10, rounded up to 7 - Definitely not for everyone, but I had fun with the film. Fans of weird and wonderful movies should see this if only for the utterly bizarre scene with the Jesus freak taxi driver-what the hell was that all about?

N. B. Soap fans look out for Eastenders' Lisa Jayne Hammond as a brothel madam!

This film appears to have a bit of an identity crisis. It simultaneously celebrates having a disabled actor with shortened arms in the lead role beating the tar out of far more able-bodied opponents, but then it rips the p*ss out of him by constantly subjecting him to jibes about his handicap which I suppose the audience are meant to find amusing, too.

In fact the whole movie is like that... bloody fight scene, followed by a part so surreal you can only assume it was meant to be funny. Alas, the battles are directed so ineptly they have precisely nil impact, and the only moments of levity here are unintentional ones. But it's worst sin is: it thinks the watchers are idiots. Maybe we are, for choosing to see a flick with such a stupid plot.

This doesn't mean it should be allowed to get away with not explaining away how a man covered from head to toe in blood can run about and drive around the streets for hours without being questioned or stopped by anyone. Or when his underwear clad wife is shot twice in the lower neck... not only is a VET able to fix her up and stop the bleeding, but she is soon on her feet, beating up big men after losing pints and pints of the red stuff. And as for the actress playing his abducted daughter... well let's be candid here, and say we're not looking at the next Shirley Temple here. (Naw, screw subtlety... she was bloomin' AWFUL)

OOPS I nearly forgot. It's got Faye from Steps in too! Apart from showing more cleavage than a Hugh Hefner special, and accidentally dowsing herself in acid (Ouch) she doesn't demonstrate any talent for thespianism at all. No wonder, when the offer came for her old band to reunite, she accepted even before the question had been asked. So it seems only fair I should end with some topical gags now... This movie is such a Tragedy, Words Are Not Enough. You'll Be Sorry if you see it... It's Better Best Forgotten.

Hilarious, I'm sure. 1/10