Triads, yardies & onion bhajees!

Any movie whose IMDb listing tells you that it had a budget of 900 pounds sterling has to be seen to be believed. Its title is just as incredible: Triads, Yardies and Onion Bhajees! (the 2003 movie originally carrying a sub-title, Once Upon a Time in Southall).

British (Punjabi-Indian) director Sarjit Bains' first feature is a tale of four London gangs. Like his second feature (the 2007 comedy, Cash and Curry) it was written by Manish Patel, born in a border town "between Tanzania and Zanzibar". Patel wrote the novel (The Stone Shiva) on which his screenplay is based, and also plays Singh, the lead character and champion hitman.

He works for the Asian gang ("The Holy Smokes") that controls west London from its Southall base. The actor cast as the leader of the cockney gang ("The English Firm") running the rackets in east London is Dave Courtney, a self-proclaimed gangster-turned-writer and occasional member of Patel and Bains' indie movie-making outfit.

North London is under the control of the Chinese "Triads", while the Jamaicans ("Yardies") own the south of the city. Watching them all and adding narrative links is a corrupt cop, played by Jonathan Reason, another gangster-movie specialist. Just to make sure that the goulash is juicy enough, Patel adds the real-life Heathrow Airport robbery to his criminal recipe.

The British market must be significant for such low-budget blood-and-action 18-plus gangster tales, and the frequency with which Guy Richie and other better-known British directors made them is now more explicable. They were (some still are) probably driven by commercial forces rather than personal fixations. If the gangster genre is popular, it's one that start-up movie-makers must work with if they want to make a living and a name.

As one of their dvd extras reveals with quiet pride, Patel (his own producer) and Bains (a one-man cinematography team and his own editor) made their movie in ten days using a camcorder. That 900-pounds claim can be believed. So can the movie much of the time. Its small-screen scale intensifies its mockumentary stylishness. The editing is fast (though too often frenetic), hand-held camera skips cut interestingly between faces (albeit too often too jerkily), and the soundtrack's contemporary Indian music also adds pace (and is only occasionally too loud).

Although the storyline promises a multi-ethnic criminal caper, this is primarily a tale of expatriate Indians and their west London crime syndicate. Patel's character has a girlfriend who's the sister of the Jamaican gang boss, but the key female interest is really the Indian goddess Kali, inspiring the anti-hero to single-handedly wipe out all the gangs' members.

The ageing white British actors look and sound convincing members of the criminal class; the non-white actors mostly appear too dulcet-toned and polite for their roles. They sound as if they'd been to good schools, but not to acting schools that would have taught them how to sound more credibly uncouth and villainous.

Onion Bhajees? That's how the Indian gang smuggles cocaine past sniffer dogs.