The Amazing Mr. No Legs (Blu-ray)

Ricou Browning, the Olympic swimmer best known as the man inside the suit of THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, directed this amazing bit of weirdness which could only have been a product of the cinematically insane 1970s. Richard Jaeckel stars as a Florida policeman tracking a gang of heroin dealers led by evil fatcat D'Angelo (Lloyd Bochner), who naturally has his hooks into everything, including the corrupt police captain (John Agar). There are drag queens, barroom brawls, shootouts, and the usual mayhem, but what makes this film particularly noteworthy is its central hitman, Lou. He has no legs and travels in a motorized wheelchair decked out with double-barreled shotguns. Lou is also strong enough that when he isn't blasting people with his killer wheelchair he can swing around on his arms and use his legless torso to bludgeon people into submission. Rance Howard plays Lou's trusty sidekick, and the film co-stars an African-American dwarf, accomplished stuntwoman Courtney Brown (who gets in a fairly flamboyant catfight), and FLIPPER's Luke Halpin, who was in the tawdry MAKO: THE JAWS OF DEATH -- also starring Jaeckel -- at around the same time). Bizarre but oddly lovable, this is entertainingly loopy grindhouse trash emblematic of the days when Times Square showed the nation's strangest films at triple-feature theaters in which the audience was often more disturbing than the mayhem onscreen.