Punching Day: Mr. No Legs (Patreon)

Mr. No Legs is one of many films in the genre of disabled people overcoming their limitations to achieve their dreams. These narratives — often presented as inspiring — are typically patronizing and reinforce views of disabled people as heroes simply for living their lives. So, thankfully, I was lying two sentences ago. Mr. No Legs is a movie about a kickass martial artist who kills guys with dual wheelchair-mounted shotguns because he loves violence.

Maybe this will resonate with you: the omnipresent availability of the sum of human knowledge is sometimes a problem for me, like when I remember a commercial from thirty years ago and stop whatever I'm doing to try and find it on YouTube. But at other times, it brings real joy into my life. To wit: the only reason I even became aware of Mr. No Legs is that I was looking up the guy who played John Sheridan's father on Babylon 5 and I stumbled across it in Rance Howard's filmography. Next to titles like Cocoon and Splash, "Mr. No Legs" really stands out.

Mr. No Legs is one of those grimy '70s movies that just kind of ambles around for 90 minutes. Maybe you know the type — they're not really in any hurry to get anywhere, they just stagger piss-drunk from drug deal at the docks to bar fight to shootout to overlong car chase finale. Everyone in it with the exception of Ted Vollrath (as the title, but not lead character) is an unremarkable white man who is probably 30 years old but looks like they've spent the last five decades eating cigarettes.

There is technically a plot here, in the same way that the "video essays" my friends and I made for class projects with our parents' VHS cameras in the late '90s had plots. The movie actually seems to resent having to tell a story when it would much rather just show you unchoreographed slapfights in the most depressing locales known to man.

Rance Howard is a mid-level drug guy who employs a college student named Ken in his efforts to stuff pills inside of cigars rolled by elderly men in a sad warehouse.

When Ken returns home after a long day of pill-stuffing, his girlfriend tells him that she's leaving because she realized what he's up to. They get into an argument, and Ken "accidentally" pushes her into an enormous '70s television, killing her instantly.

Ken calls in his drug mentor for help, and he suggests shooting the body full of heroin to make it look like an overdose. As they're getting her stuff out of Ken's apartment, Mr. No Legs shoots the kid to cover their tracks. Rance Howard is saddened by this development, because he's an actor desperately trying to inject some kind of emotional pathos into his role.

From there, Ken's girlfriend's cop brother Andy and his partner, Chuck, try to unravel the mystery of her death. Andy is played by professional wrestler Ron Slinker. Chuck is played by Richard Jaeckel, one of those guys who had a semi-dignified career in westerns for most of his life then gradually sank into the sludge of B-movies in the '70s and '80s. Put it this way: he was in a movie with Leslie Nielsen and a movie with "Airplane!" in the title, and they were not the same film.

Andy and Chuck amble through the movie without any particular urgency. In my favorite scene, they arrive at a bar which appears to have been constructed out of plywood twenty minutes before shooting, and probably was. Then again, I think a lot of stuff just looked like that in the 70s.

This bar, let me fucking tell you. It's got everything. It's got women fighting each other and howling racial slurs. It's got a little person. It's got a transgender woman portrayed in what is, for the '70s, a shockingly positive way. Hell, it would probably inspire death threats today.

This woman is hanging out with a guy at the bar who looks like a Robert Crumb drawing come to life. Things are going well, but over on the other side of the joint, simmering racial tensions are exploding into violence as two women get into a drunken brawl.

Wisely, the woman at the bar makes a beeline for the door. Her Romeo tries to stop her by grabbing at her hair like a violent toddler and her wig comes off. I was bracing for the entire bar to turn and look, but I forgot that this was the '70s and everyone was too stoned on leaded gasoline fumes to have any idea what was happening around them. What actually happens is that she calls her would-be lover a bastard, smashes a bottle over his head, and gets out of dodge.

This lady could not have known that her simple act of violence would have the same impact on the denizens of this alehouse as would introducing firearms to a tribe of uncontacted people. The thought that beer vessel can also = weapon spreads through the bar like wildfire, and suddenly no one is safe. The guy sitting on the counter lashes out at a man who's just stumbled in, seemingly at random.

Less than 10 seconds later, a white patron shouts "that black bitch!" The bartender knows what he has to do: make him a famous 55￠fish san—

The cops arrive and karate slop their way through everyone in the bar, only to discover that their source, the white woman whose racial slur started the entire mess, is dead at the hands of Mr. No Legs. The protagonists have learned nothing and their mission has not changed. But you were obligated to have at least one bar fight in every '70s B-movie, and this scene ticked that box with gusto.

The cops eventually connect the murder to drug lord D'Angelo, Mr. No Legs' employer. He's sort of the Palpatine to No Legs' Vader, and yes, he calls his employee "No Legs." Not even a "Mr." You think he'd put a little more respect on the name of the guy who carries two concealed shotguns at all times, even when he's at the pool!

In fact, the film is as much about Mr. No Legs' Shakespearean hunger for power as it is about two incompetent police officers trying to solve one and a half murders. See, D'Angelo and Mr. No Legs don't see eye to eye. That's not a wheelchair joke! They have genuine philosophical disagreements about how to run a criminal organization. Also maybe the police chief is in cahoots with D'Angelo? Sure, let's throw that in. For some reason it is vital that we have more villains in this film who aren't Mr. No Legs.

D'Angelo is a businessman. He likes paying people off, because it's less expensive than exploding them and then hiring someone to clean up the mess. Mr. No Legs, on the other hand, has a lust for violence that cannot be sated. He is a berserker champion of the Blood God whose solution to every problem he encounters is two shotguns. So when D'Angelo finally gets sick of his subordinate taking matters into his own hands and splattering people's brains all over the city, he tells his army of goons to separate him from his wheelchair and take him out.

Oh, you sweet summer children. Did you think that you could neutralize Mr. No Legs by committing a hate crime and dumping him out of his chair? You fools. The chair was only ever holding back his incredible fury, lest it explode in the form of unrestrained karate violence.

Ted Vollrath had his legs blown off in Korea. After he returned to America, he hopped on the karate train and rode it straight to Black Belt Town, Population: Him. Mr. No Legs was built entirely around Vollrath's abilities, and the rest of the movie is essentially just the bare minimum necessary to support this scene in which he fights several thugs in hand-to-hand combat.

Eventually the goons stop running up to Mr. No Legs one at a time and throw themselves at him in a pair, attempting to drown him under 400 pounds of hairy '70s guy.

He escapes with ease, then does maybe the single coolest thing I've ever seen to finish off the last guy.

Having survived this onslaught of mooks, Mr. No Legs concocts a plan to deal with all of his enemies by calling them to a central location and then shooting them to death, a solution as simple as it is elegant. He manages to gun down his boss, but he evidently wasn't counting on the corrupt police chief having a gun, because his response to being shot at is to roll directly towards him and die.

Both the drug dealer and his dual-wielding lieutenant are full of holes, and the heroes have the chief dead to rights. The end, right? Wrong. There is still nearly twenty minutes of runtime left in the movie. It will feel like six hours as we lurch through the longest (subjectively) and most pointless (objectively) car chase in cinematic history. It does, however, give us an artful shot of a cop car exploding on the beach.

The end! Ted Vollrath somehow never got another movie role. The director, Ricou Browning, was the second unit director on Police Academy 5. Did you know there was a fifth Police Academy picture? Did you know that Ricou Browning was also the co-creator of Flipper? Did you know that he was the Creature from the Black Lagoon? The world yet has such wonders to reveal to us.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Dan B, our Professor Emeritus of Shakespearean Violence, who maintains Mr. No Legs is Richard III with improved mobility.

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