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.
