10 Films More Controversial Than Charlie Sheen's 9/11 Movie
Dare you see The Amazing Mr No Legs?
Keep your eyes out this September and you’ll see a movie whose trailer provoked a Twitter backlash, with one user claiming, “It’s awful and manipulative and makes me mad at everyone involved.”
From the director of National Lampoon’s Cattle Call comes 9/11, which stars Charlie Sheen as a businessman trapped in an elevator in the World Trade Center on the eponymous date. Also starring Whoopi Goldberg and Gina Gershon, the film is based on the play Elevator by Patrick Carson, which Tucson Weekly described as “an interesting but rather skeletal piece begging to be fleshed out with richer characterizations.”
The trailer condescends to the audience by informing us the movie is “based on actual events” and invites accusations of tastelessness by including its release date (September 8th) and giving prominence to Sheen who, other controversies aside, is on record as saying that 9/11 “feels like a conspiracy theory.”
Will the movie be shamelessly manipulative or merely banal? Does it really matter? After all, Uwe Boll’s Postal opens with a comic recreation of the 9/11 attacks, but how many people have seen it?
Boll’s movie was marketed with the slogan, “Some Movies Go Too Far, Others Start There” which is a decent enough summary of movies that set out to shock their audiences. Here are ten movies that actually achieve it.
10. The Amazing Mr No Legs
Directed by Ricou Browning, the former stuntman who played The Creature From The Black Lagoon, 1979’s Mr No Legs is a Z-grade exploitation movie about Lou (real life double amputee Ted Vollrath), a mob enforcer whose wheelchair comes equipped with machine guns.
Lou’s also a martial artist, and if you get in his way, then as the poster warns, “he’ll cut you down to size!” In the film’s most jaw-dropping moment, that’s exactly what he does, leaping out of his chair to kill an army of thugs sent to wipe him out.
His sidekick in the picture is played by Rance “father of Ron” Howard, who by that point had been acting for 20 years, including stints on the TV show Happy Days where Ron played Richie Cunningham. Rance later appeared in his son’s movies, including Splash, Cocoon and Apollo 13.