Triads, Yardies & Onion Bhajees review (DVD) ★

Where do I start? Words cannot describe how awful this film is. But I'll have a go. It's so terrible that I actually had to restrain myself from giving it no stars at all, which is something, along with ½ star ratings, that I just don't do.

Based on a novel by the film's screenwriter and star Manish Patel, and with the subtitle “Once Upon a Time in Southall”, Triads, Yardies and Onion Bhajees is the story of an Asian gang called the Holy Smokes at war with Triads, Yardies and, no, not onion bhajees (isn't it spelt 'bhaji'?), but The Firm, the last gang of Anglo-Saxon cockneys left in London. At the helm of a huge drugs trafficking operation where cocaine is transported in onion bhajis so sniffer dogs won't be able to detect the narcotics, the Holy Smokes also land themselves in not only the hottest, but the deepest water when they steal six million dollars from Heathrow Airport, planting the seeds for a string of murders between the rival gangs and chaos on the streets of the capitol city.

The only thing actually interesting in the film is the idea of smuggling cocaine in the food, but that's it. And even that little shimmer of creative hope just simply isn't bright enough to offer any redeeming qualities whatsoever. The movie is a sham and a joke. It was first released into independent cinemas in 2003, so it's taken seven years to get this garbage onto DVD. I'm really not surprised. Whoever wrote the quote on the box art that it's the best British gangster film since Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is quite frankly a complete and utter moron.

Stylistically, Triads, Yardies and Onion Bhajees is atrocious. It's presented in horribly grainy black and white for no purpose that I could see, with off, shaky camerawork. The director obviously had absolutely no idea what he was doing. The same goes for the writer—I have no idea what his novel is like, but his script contains some of the worst dialogue ever written, and not only is the writing wholly foul, but it's coupled in a marriage from hell with actors who can't do just that—act. Literally no one in the movie is a decent performer, and I'm not being too harsh or exaggerating in the slightest. In fact, in the making of special feature, you see a couple of pages of the script and it's not even formatted correctly. Who the hell would invest their time, money and effort into making a movie with a “screenplay” so mind-numbingly bad? I would have killed myself if I had the sheer misfortune of reading it.

So many bodies are left in the wake of the gang warfare and not a single squib is used, not even a single spray of blood. This is a low-budget independent movie, but that's no excuse for not using squibs in a near two-hour film. The film-makers, if you can call them that, really need to read Robert Rodriguez's book and see how he made El Mariachi on a shoestring. Throughout the running time you see the same weapons used over and over again, and I think they were just plastic BB guns to be perfectly honest. Gunshots are illustrated by the addition of a white flash on the screen, and on the odd occasion you get to see hellishly, infuriatingly bad CGI thrown into the mix. No one in the film deserves to work near movies again. Cinematic abortion. Burn every copy you can find.

EXTRAS ★★ The BBC's making of feature, public reaction to the film, theatrical trailer, radio interviews and two trailers for the film Cash and Curry, directed and co-written by Bains and Patel respectively—so it's probably nightmarishly bad.